A Note to Susan...You Know...David's little sister...

That water was frozen solid but didn't know it. I was blue with cold, skinny, shaking to my bones while your brothers and your Dad jumped repeatedly into it, oblivious to the overwhelming numbing it produced in me. But your brothers were like that and your Dad led the way. He was the proverbial hairy chested man. Teddy Roosevelt for the group of Rough Riders. Smart, adventurous, fearless, intimidating...I assumed that he could beat up any other fathers in a 100 mile radius if there was any need to do so. And your Mom was Mother Teresa. Everything she did was for someone else. I never saw her angry or heard her raise her voice.

I wanted to live at your house, and kind of did. My house was much more Ward & June, Mom wore pearls, the living room was spotless. Dad added the presence of a very polite and cordial professor who was married to Mom. In your house loaded guns were propped up in corners, Twinkies were in the pantry, and a black racer was loose in the living room. One time David and I needed an aquarium for something and found one in the basement that hadn't been used in over a year. When we took it outside and dumped out the sand, a horn toad spilled out with it. Still alive, it sat in the sun for a few minutes and recharged its battery pack. Then we lifted up a slate stepping stone in my backyard where I knew there to be a huge anthill and sat Mr Toad on top of the hill. Having a full charge and a years worth of meals to catch up on, he put on his bib and went to work. That toad zapped and swallowed every big, juicy red ant that showed its face. He adjusted his position so that his tongue was in perfect proximity to the hole as soldiers streamed out to protect the colony. That toad ate them all, each little mini-roast beef that emerged was zapped at camera shutter speeds, until there were...none.

Well, not none, none, I guess the eggs were still there, maybe even the queen. And that same ant colony repopulated itself, big time. Several months later it was flourishing under that slate stepping stone. They should have been given the frequency with which I fed them a good breakfast. Mom thought that everyone, except Dad, had to have a “good breakfast” and she made one every day. Too much, actually. So when she took her break to drive Dad to the train station after he had a big breakfast of a cup of coffee and two Camel cigarettes, I ran outside and dumped my food under that slate. In our house a clean plate was the only pass for leaving the table. So on a lazy Summer day when David and I were trying to think of something fun to do, preferably something that involved fire, gunpowder, explosions, or really anything that could cause us to loose a finger, we had an epiphany. Why not take the lead balls we made to shoot in one of the black powder rifles and melt them down and pour the molten lead down the ant hill? It made sense. The liquid lead was heavy enough and hot enough to drain down to the bottom of the ant chambers before it cooled and solidified. Using a small cast iron skillet on the top of our gas range, we melted and poured, melted and poured. Cooling quickly, we were able to start digging up our creation soon after. But it didn't come easily. It was like digging up the root ball of a tree and we had to be careful not to loose any of the roots. It seemed like it would take us forever. Then once again we were stunned with our own creative brilliance. The hose...use the garden hose. We shoved the running hose into the ground around the ant hill, massaging the dirt surrounding the lead chambers as the water churned the area into a nice big bowl of mud soup. Digging deeper and deeper until we were up to our armpits and I had to dip the side of my head into the thick brown pool to get to the bottom of the lead, the deepest chambers. With both of us straddling the mud pit that we had created in the middle of the path from our back door to the driveway, we lifted out the lead chambers in slow motion. Inverting the dripping, muddy mess onto the grass so the weight of the lead rested on what had been the main entrance, we squirted the whole thing clean with the hose. And there it was, a three foot high and wide exact replica of an exceptionally large red ant colony, complete with incinerated ant exoskeletons. It was a thing of wonder and beauty, our own mini Pompeii of ants.

David and I built a wooden frame to hang it in and submitted it to our 9^th grade science class as a joint project. Kudos and awards followed. When we finally went back to retrieve it at the end of the school year, the teacher had broken away and discarded the frame and had mashed the lead into a ball. We were told that this had been done to create more room for storage of other things. It was a message about how education in the school system often manifested itself that resonated with me for many years afterward.