The Ants Come Marching In

This is the first time that Chris and I have ever lived together in an older home. And by older, I mean “built more than three months ago.”

We lucked out with our first house. It was three months old and looked pristine. The retired couple who lived in it had arranged to have it built for them so that they could move from Florida to be closer to their children.

After their first snowstorm in their brand-new house, the couple decided to forget about the kids and move back to Florida. We bought the house, and maintenance, for us, consisted primarily of attempting to clean puppy pee-pee stains off the light blue carpet.

When we sold the house a short 11 months later, we were older and wiser. Living together for the first time is hard enough for any normal couple, but living together in a house that requires lawn mowing, contains a cliff in the backyard, a cliff in the front yard, and no ability to fence the yard to keep in 2 wild chihuahua pups would have been enough to drive us to divorce had we gotten married pre-cohabitation.

To top it off, that house was in Salem, Massachusetts. A greatly historical town, to us it mostly meant a twenty minute trip just to get out of the town. Most of our friends didn’t visit, and going out to visit them took up more time than it was worth.

The second house we purchased was brand new, in that it hadn’t even been completed when we put it under agreement. I wasn’t crazy about the house at that time, but Chris loved it. We could afford it only because it was in Woburn, scene of “A Civil Action” which had given it a reputation of toxic water, and the new street was located directly behind the low income housing for the town.

We managed to stay in that house for nearly 3 years. Toward the end, I was driven away by the noisy neighbors in the low income housing (I was convinced they were dealing crack on their doorstop) and our rich asian-trash neighbors on our street, who had illegal immigrants living in their house and about 5 cars parked regularly outside it.

Chris and I searched for our next house for several years, and finally we found it: an 1968 contemporary on the “good” side of Woburn. Only problem? Days before our anticipated closing date, the sellers suddenly decided that, legalities be damned, they didn’t want to move for another month.

By then, it was too late to stop the sale of our own house, which was starting to look better and better to me. Chris and I and the three dogs moved into a tiny hotel room. Euphemistically termed a “suite,” the only sweet thing about the room was the free breakfast.

After negotiations for our contemporary house failed, Chris and I filed a lawsuit against the owners of the previous house, and started our house search all over again. What had taken us over two years was now reduced to a month, because we couldn’t afford to stay in the hotel any longer, financially or emotionally. Everything we owned was in storage, except for a few favorite toys for the dogs and some summer clothing we’d hastily grabbed on our way out the door.

We settled on this house: a smaller 1950s cape/colonial with no garage, an old furnace that wasted more heat than it gave out, and a wonderful location.

For the first time in our lives, we were living in a town that didn’t raise our car insurance costs sky-high. I felt safe merely locking the doors at night, and didn’t bother ordering an alarm system. But the property taxes? Double what we’d have paid for a larger home in Woburn, and the commute was doubled for Chris.

But this house required real maintenance. Vacuuming infrequently wouldn’t cut it anymore. Heating vents needed to be cleaned, chimneys capped, and electrical sockets replaced. And all of this cost money.

Chris hated fixing things. At our last house, the hardest thing he’d tackled was putting in the screen doors, which never quite closed propertly. In this house, it was a struggle just getting the washer and dryer hooked up, and the entertainment unit squeezed into position. He swore, he fussed, he grumbled when I tried to help, and he became very, very angry when I suggested he take a break.

After these attempts at handyman work, both Chris and I had to lie down to rest from the stress.

Despite our mounting heating bills, the house never really warmed up, and the dogs trained us to place their beds in prime positions next to the heating vents so that what little warm air there was blew directly onto them.

But it wasn’t until the ants invaded that we realized we were losing our battle with the house.

Mina had developed an odd habit of eating her supper by picking up a mouthful of kibble, carrying it over to a new spot on the floor or a bed, and dropping all the kibbles. Carefully, she picked through the pile and ate perhaps 1 or 2 of the 7 kibbles she’d transported. Then it was back to the food dish for a new mouthful.

Apparently she was able to tell which kibbles were fresher than others, and she was only interested in eating the good ones. This meant that frequently, unless another dog came by, abandoned kibbles remained on the floor or bed.

One day I came home from running an errand and spotted two oddly-shaped kibbles on the floor near the food dish. I walked over to pick them up and found they were both covered with tiny ants.

Naturally, I screamed. I am not proud of this, but moments like these bring out the baser instincts in people, and my base instinct was to fear all bugs and hide in my bed until they disappeared.

I was so overwrought that I had to sit down and yell for Chris to pick up the ant-infested kibbles. Eventually I was able to stand up, and I did what I could by squishing about 30 ants that were still merrily making their way to Kibble Party Central.

The worst part about the ant infestation was that the ants simply wouldn’t die easily. I smashed one ant about 10 times before it finally succumbed to my ministrations. Eventually, with practice, I learned to line up my wad of toilet paper with the midsection of each ant so that I could crush them with a fingernail until I heard a snap.

We became more careful about picking up the kibble after every meal, and I washed all the dog bedding. But every time I shook out a bed or toy, more ants, in various stages of life, fell out.

The ants didn’t seem to believe that the free flow of kibble had stopped, and persisted in traveling into our bathroom and around the family room in an effort to scout out where we might be hiding the good food.

We made our own journey, but ours was to the local Home Depot. We purchased some ant traps which claimed to contain delicious bits of poison which the ants would bring back to their nests.

I carefully gated off the ant trap, just in case the delicious poison attracted our dogs (after all, Mina had once spent an engrossing afternoon nibbling on some Tupperware), and waited.

The word spread quickly. “Hey, man, another big blowout’s going on down the street,” the ants reported. “And this time, the food’s small enough that we can bring it home for a snack! Not like that giant meatball thing my grandpa found in the spring of 2004. Now that was a party, he said.”

The ants trooped under the gate and into the ant trap. Chris reported seeing some ants stagger out with poison food, and having difficulty fitting back under the gate. I wanted to help them carry it out, but Chris, wisely suspecting that my “help” would involve more mess (I can’t help it that the first time I picked up an ant trap, I spilled it everywhere!), suggested I sit back and read a book instead.

Now I try to restrain my instincts when I spy the ants. I want to crush their spines with my toilet paper, but I have to remember to do what’s best for the colony. Bring home that poisonous food, you terrors of the night. And feel free to come back for seconds.

Posted by: ssjane | February 3, 2004 | 2:22 pm
Posted in: This Life