Item: 1 ant

Monday night we had a heck of a rainstorm here.  It doesn't usually rain so hard or so long - I kept waking up and wondering if it was for real.  Tuesday morning, I discovered that a whole bunch of ants had come into my bathroom in the night and were walking back and forth in a line across the floor.  Now that it's dry outside, they appear to have all gone home, except for this one straggler.  I'm going to try to caulk up where I think they were coming from before it starts raining again, as is forecasted for later this week.

Everyone I've mentioned the ants to has been appalled, but if I have to have a household pest, I think ants are by far the best possible option.  My old place sometimes had ants, too, only they were in the kitchen, which was much worse.

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Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent.  This day always makes me think of this TS Eliot poem.  It's a rich and shadowy poem full of images, which can mean what they mean according to where I am at the time.  There's a lot in it about turning - as in turning to God, or turning away from God - and about stairs.  It makes me think of a spiral staircase, where the poet looks back down and sees how he turned and when.

To me, the poem is basically about the struggle of trying to keep a true faith.  There's a line near the end that separates the faith from what it can become: affirm before the world and deny between the rocks.  This is why I appreciate the ritual of Lent.  The next 40 days can go by with me doing only the things I always do, or I can gravitate back to the needs of the soul, the truth, the sacrifice.