Me: "Who has the best seat in the house, me or daddy?"

Adam: "Well, Daddy's is nice, but yours is best. Your's is squishier."

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The ants go marching one by one...


We have an ant problem. The problem is the ants think our house is a graveyard. Much like an elephant graveyard, a place where for some unexplained reason, elephants go to die. No elephants, but we have within our home the equivalent in miniature proportions.

Only with ants, they don’t go somewhere to die. They die wherever they fall, and then some studious housekeeper-ant drags their tiny corpses out of the nest and dumps ‘em…

on our bathroom floor.

There is an ever changing pile of lifeless insects next to our shower at any point in the day. We vacuum them up, they reappear an hour or a day or a week later.

This is not our only problem with the critters.

Most ants dutifully crawl in a steady, thick, meandering line with the single-minded goal of finding a stray candy cane chunk or a lone honey-nut cheerio. They make steady work in dismantling it and returning it to their home. That is the way they are supposed to do it. I thought there were some sort of ant-rules that must outline the consistent if-ever annoying behavior. Not here. Not in my house.

Here the ants wander, one at a time, along the walls, floor, rugs, and children. In nearly every room of our house a few moments of looking will yield about four or five straggling ants, meandering like ciphers feet apart and in no particular direction. They seem purposeless, like slow flies in winter. We wake with single ants on our foreheads, find them in the napkins, and swipe them from our toothbrushes.

I have even found an ant in my cleavage. Not such a terrible way to die for an ant, if you ask me, but seriously, there?

Still, it is the pile of dead ants I don’t understand. With all the great outdoors at their disposal, literally, they choose my bathroom.

I guess it could be worse. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't even land on my list of trials.
.
Hey, at least it’s not squirrels.

1 comment:

julean said...

This is a funny post! I can well imagine your plight. The meandering, loner ants may have something on the mindless, follower ants, though. We came home from vacation one time to find a trail of ants from the kitchen sink across the floor and up to the freezer where they squoze through a crack and all froze to death in a heap at the bottom. The poor ants had no idea they were marching to their deaths. The only way we could get them to stop going to the freezer was to leave a pile of dirty dishes in the sink for the weekend! We were vacuuming and wiping out frozen ants for weeks. No matter how you look at it piles of dead ants are gross!

PS It was so nice to talk to you both this morning.