Ants in my pans #WednesdayWisdom

I am down with the ‘flu since the last three days. Right now my husband is yelling at me to get off the computer, and I say, please, just two minutes.

Apologies for being a day late with the Wednesday Wisdom, but hey, wisdom any day of the week works, right?

So I’ll keep this really short today. I can, you know!

This story is about my Mom. Today, 8 Feb, marks 8 years of her passing away. The pain is always fresh, you know.

If you’re a loyal reader of this blog and have read this anecdote before, please indulge me. Perhaps it will make you smile again.

My Mom, in spite of all that she went through life, had a fabulous attitude and managed to be positive always.

We enjoyed spending time together in the kitchen. Well, those days she did, and I loved to hang out with her, good naturedly doing stuff with her. Over the years, I’ve realized that’s how I’ve learned so much.

So anyway, during the summer months, ants filed into our kitchen and no matter what we did, they would be there. I guess they were there because it was cool inside.

To deter the ants, we had little moats on the kitchen countertop. A moat was a large tray of water with a stand in the middle on which we kept the food. It mostly worked. My son, of course saw this as a fairy tale setting, with the ants as villains. Some of them managed to swim across, mostly unsuccessfully, which made us sad. Irony, eh?

One day, after lunch, we packed the leftovers into smaller containers to place on our “moat.” We also had a “moat” for our juice bottles.

After looking around, satisfied the kitchen was clean enough, we settled down to watch a movie.

Tea time came, and my Mom got up to go make the tea.

I heard a shout of laughter and my Mom calling out to me.

As I entered the kitchen, I saw her hunched over the counter top, watching intently. She beckoned me close, as though the ants would hear her if she spoke, and pointed to the juice bottle. I was stunned to see the droves of tiny ants busily juicing it up.

I don’t know what might have happened, but I think one of us must have accidentally kept one of the juice bottles very close to the rim of the tray. And, sure enough, these ants (probably the ones that qualified for the Olympic long jump) managed to get on the bottle.

All worked up, I opened my mouth to rant and my Mom burst out laughing. That stopped me in my tracks and I looked at her, question marks all over my face. And she said, “Vidya – they’ve worked so hard to get there. Don’t you think they deserve it?”. That was so funny and of course, I laughed too.

From that day on, whenever we were careless enough to leave something on the countertop – or anywhere else and saw ants on it – we looked at each other and sedately said “They deserve it”.

♥

Feel free to take away what you want from this story. For me, it is to go through life with a good attitude, love, generosity and a massive dose of humor.

And now, please excuse me. I am going back to bed.

#WednesdayWisdom is a series with short bursts of easy-to-consume wisdom in the form of stories, quotes, anecdotes, and humor.