Flying Ant Day

July

A stickiness in the air, a hum, the sun finally baking paving slabs into summertime. One day a year the conditions are just right. For a fleeting moment, we are united in glee and horror as a mass of tiny insects gather, pulse on the ground like a tray of rice being shaken, and then…swarm.

Flying Ant Day. It takes me back to Julys when my grey school skirt prickled hot against my legs and a late summer afternoon held the delicious promise of no homework and an icy pop from the freezer compartment. Sometimes it was an amusing distraction during a Wimbledon match, the winged creatures plaguing players as I watched in the stuffy darkness of our lounge, curtains drawn. It all reminds me of the endless battle between the ants and my dad to take control of the threshold between outside and in. Powder, boiling water, physical barriers were all put in place to keep the creeping line out of the house.

Now I know that the ants are on their nuptial flight, queens and drones temporarily taking to the skies to scatter their colony as far as they can manage in one fantastic day of airborne mating, I’m sad to think of the disgust and destruction that follows these miniature travellers. I caught the centre of the orgy yesterday, a confusing chaos of red and black crawling and hovering around the stone wall outside my back door. When I returned later to make a cup of tea, the whole crowd had disappeared

I wonder if those little marching ants feel a sense of awe as their wings grow, as they test out the thermal layers and lift off the ground for the first time. Is it a microscopic version of human adolescents leaving home, becoming spectacular and reckless and leaving their more steady elders stranded behind them?

I always mark Flying Ant Day by messaging a friend, who will also be looking out for the eerie shifting of soil as the spreading, living clouds puff up from the ground. We delight in marking this carnival in the calendar. This year, I learned that West Oxfordshire is rather ahead, and the ants are yet to launch where she is. There, the young ones are still buried in dry earth, ready to upend themselves and spin off into their futures.