I’ve had an annoying children’s song stuck in my head for a week now. Maybe you know it.

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah.

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah.

The ants go marching one by one,

The little one stops to suck his thumb

And they all go marching down to the ground

To get out of the rain, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Now it’s probably stuck in your head too. I’m not sorry. Misery loves company.

If you’ve ever had the wherewithal to listen to the entire song, you know that after nine long verses, the ants go marching ten by ten and the little one stops to say, “the end.” And we all breathe a sigh of relief that it’s finally over.

I’ve been humming that little ditty ever since I saw a dark spot at the top of my stairs. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the spot was moving. Closer still and I saw that it was a pile of ants. I’m no ant expert, but I assumed they were sugar ants. And they were crawling all over each other like very tiny pigs at a very tiny trough.

I disposed of them and did some investigating. Reinforcements — or reinforcemANTS — seemed to be marching hurrah, hurrah, from a crack near my front door. And there were a few ants on every step all apparently climbing toward the trough at the top of the stairs. I was impressed. Those itty-bitty creatures climbing all my steps is like me climbing Devils Tower seven times — without climbing gear.

The next day, I found another little heap of ants in the hallway. And a few days later I found one in my basement. I had to wonder what could be so enticing that they’d conquer Devils Tower seven times to get to it? I have been known to snack throughout the house but I can’t remember ever doing it on the top step or in the middle of the hallway or by the treadmill in the basement.

And why now? We’ve never had so many ants visit before. Then it occurred to me. Maybe the ants were coming all this way in “ant-icipation” of, well, hairball medicine. It doesn’t seem very ant-like but the timing is right.

I used to give my cat hairball medicine by putting a dab of it on my fingers and letting him lick it off. He fell for it every time. Then one day, I opened a new tube — the same brand and the same flavor. But he turned up his nose at it.

Since then, I’ve had to administer the gooey medicine by smearing it on the top of his paws. Being a self-cleaning mechanism, he does eventually get it down. Or at least, some of it. But first he runs through the house flicking his paws trying to remove it.

This explains why you see little blobs of hairball medicine here and there around our house. I like to think it also explains why ants have trekked to such random spots in our house. Either that or my husband has taken to snacking while seated on the top step, in the middle of the hallway and by the treadmill in the basement.

It’s all just theory. I don’t even know if sugar ants go for tuna flavor. Or if they get hairballs. But if they do, I hope that before they go “marching down to the ground” for winter, they clean up all the medicine my cat has flung all over the house.

Dorothy Rosby is an author and humor columnist whose work appears regularly in publications in the West and Midwest. You can subscribe to her blog at www.dorothyrosby.com or contact at www.dorothyrosby.com/contact.