Living with a View to the End

While working in my study one day in Jamaica, my children came in all excited.  They took me by the arm and dragged me into the backyard in order to show me something they had discovered.  We had an old rundown fire pit there with gaps, holes and chips in the mortar joints between the bricks.  Inside the walls of that pit through a hole about a quarter inch around a colony of ants had made their nest. On this particular morning these ants were performing a most amazing feat.  Hundreds of them...