We go downtown for fish tacos at the Krazy Taco. My wife suggested it because we couldn't get in on my birthday-- it had been too crowded.

It's my birthday all over again.

On the way home we stop at my wife's favourite used clothes shop. My birthday is over. Now it is her birthday.

The used clothes store is small and crowded on weekends. My aversion to crowds seems to be surpassed only by the average old lady shopper's apparent love of, or perhaps unawareness of, them.

I try to browse, but soon give in to my inevitable frustration, and tell my wife I am going to sit outside. She checks her watch, and seems satisfied that I've tried my best.

I have a spot on some rocks under a tree around the side of the store. I sit there every time we come to this store. Not the whole time– I usually slip off to the bakery and get something sweet. But today I've just eaten, and just get something to wet my throat. It is only early May, but the sun is acting like it is July.

Getting back to my rock with some Italian lemon sparkling water, I pull out my phone and start reading.

I'm out of the sun, in shorts and a t-shirt, but sweating like my brother Richard after a coffee. My fancy bits are murky and musty and screaming to be let out.

The sweat is dripping down my lower back, and it reminds me of the fabled Wolf Spider Summer from my childhood in Kamloops.

Every morning when we turned the light on in the relative cool of basement, there were dozens of spiders, their eyes dangling provocatively of little eye stems, basking on the carpet in the morning cool.

It was the summer that Arachnophobia had come out, and I was laying on the couch one hot day, with my knees up, watching it.

The sweat pooled in my knee pits and, dripping down my leg, felt for all the world like a wolf spider.

A worthy scare that apparently revisits me to this day.

I feel the sweat dripping down my back, past the loose band of my underwear. It moves like a wolf spider, but I am no longer an easily startled teen.

The drips continue. And they start dripping up my legs, into my Crocs, and across my neck.

They are dripping in directions that drips shouldn't drip, and I distractedly reach down my back to figure out what's going on.

I pull up a drop of sweat, only to realize it is an ant that I've inadvertently rolled into an ant ball.

Looking down, the drips coming up my legs are also ants. Not angry, just busy. Like all the ants you've ever known. I brush them off. The drip on my neck was maybe an ant, maybe a spider; either way, it is now just a ball with some legs and some pincers.

I continue reading, intermittently reaching back and pulling ant balls out of my pants.
They are oddly persistent in that direction, and I finally stand up to see that my perch in the rocks is the front porch of an ant hill.

But it is my spot, and it takes fully disengaging from my reading to realize that maybe it is time to choose a new spot.

I pick up my empty lemon sparkling water, and the other full one– they were one plus one, the Korean term for 'buy one, get one', and go find a spot around the back of the building.