It’s now been more than six months since I bought the house. And have I finished unpacking? Duh. Of course not.

Which is nothing to beat myself up over. We all have a few of those boxes that just seem to linger in the basement, collecting dust and filled with who-knows-what, because we can’t bring ourselves to bother unpacking them. I am sure my boxes will still be sitting there in 5 years.

What’s in them?

Who knows.

I do hope that at least one of them contains my father’s ketchup recipe. I have looked in all other logical locations for it—in between pages of my cookbooks, in bags of random papers I didn’t know what to do with when we were packing, on my bookshelves, in my hideously unorganized collection of clipped recipes, in my desk drawers, under the couch, etc.

It would kill me if I lost it.

But I did find this:

It’s a can of chocolate-covered ants that my mother found in the same Great American Kitchen Purge that turned up the old ketchup recipe. Apparently my father had been holding on to this can for years. It’s just a bit smaller than a can of tuna fish.

The ants are probably about 40 years old. Crazy, huh? When I shake it, I can hear something bouncing around in there. Certainly not like a robust can of chocolate-covered ants, but I can tell that they haven’t disintegrated entirely.

I wish I could open it and see what remains, but something doesn’t feel right about that. Once you open a can of ants, you can’t go back.