You Can’t Drown a Fire Ant

You Can’t Drown a Fire Ant August 26, 2015

You can’t drown a fire ant.  Not if it’s got friends.  What happens in a downpour, or if they end up in a puddle or a bucket of water is that a group of fire ants will cling to each other.  Well, more than cling: what they do is to make a raft out of themselves.  People say it’s like waterproof material, how they’re woven together.  And they stay afloat.

My family is part of a CSA–a community supported agriculture farm–where we pay a subscription for vegetables, delivered each Wednesday to our church, among with the boxes of other subscribers.  But we’re not buying the vegetables.  Not exactly.  With a CSA, what you do is invest in a share of the yield.  If it’s a bumper crop, everyone feasts.  If it’s a puny year, everyone shares the loss.

A few weeks ago, we got an email from the farmers who run this CSA that a hailstorm had swept through and destroyed most of their crops.  They wouldn’t have replacement crops in till September.  We pay on a monthly basis, and the farmers were kind–they said if people wanted to delay their payments till the produce resumed, they could.  But it felt good to pay for August.  To share in the fortune, even when the farm hit hard times.

In a week when the stock market has seemed more like a ride at Dollywood than a reflection of a solid economy, and major candidates for President don’t discuss climate change, even after July was the hottest month ever recorded?  What seems to make sense is to live like a fire ant.


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