A damp, cloudy day has replaced our two days of summer. It is 57° which is still quite warm, but it’s no deck day. From my window, I can see pine trunks and branches dark against the light grey sky. A slight breeze flutters the dangling dead oak leaves. It’s a sweatshirt day.

Yesterday TCM was b&w 1950’s science fiction day. I watched a behemoth rise from the Thames and a glob of radioactivity melt people. The best of the films was THEM!, the giant ant movie, one of my all time favorites. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I still remembered some of the dialogue. “Make me a sergeant in charge of the booze,” is one of its memorable lines. At the beginning of the film, the regular size ants eating the sugar on the floor of the destroyed shop is a great scene and the only hint of what is to come. Pat Medford, the lady PhD, got off the plane wearing a suit, a hat and white gloves while Robert Graham aka James Arness, the FBI hero, constantly complained about the desert heat but never took off his fedora. Before the Big Dig, as you went through the South Station tunnel in Boston, you could hear, bouncing off the walls, the exact sound the ants made. I always listened for it as I drove through.

In Ghana, some of the ant hills are taller than people. They always looked like something out of a science fiction movie to me. The hills, made out of sand, are different shapes: some look like the sand castles we used to build on the beach while others resemble stalagmites which rise from the savannah like conical sand icicles. I never stopped to see the ants by the hills, but once during training an army of ants marched across the school grounds. The column was about a foot wide, but I have no idea how long it was as I had to pull myself away to go teach. I watched as long as I could. Some of the ants carried leaves while others carried food of some sort. We’d put a leaf in the middle of the column, but it never deterred the ants who’d move around it on the two sides then regroup when past it. It was fascinating.

I have a full dance card today.