It
all began when I dozed off on the sofa the other night while watching TV. When
I woke up, I felt a pain in my mouth, on the inside of my cheek. I ran my
tongue over the painful area and felt something unusual – kind of like two hard
bumps.
Puzzled,
I headed to the bathroom mirror and checked out my mouth. There, attached to
the inside of my cheek, was a big black ant.
After I jumped around and screamed for a few seconds, I removed the ant
and gave it a burial at sea (well, septic tank). I figured I must have fallen
asleep with my mouth open and the ant crawled in. Then I must have shut my
mouth and held it captive. I don’t know what the critter was doing in its
attempt to get free, but it felt as if it had used an ice pick and a
hatchet.
The
incident left me feeling so paranoid, I pictured myself waking up with ants
between my teeth the next morning. I even contemplated duct taping my mouth
shut when I went to bed that night. But
I quickly dismissed that idea when I figured the ants probably would take and
alternate route and climb up my nose instead.
I
finally convinced myself that the ant in my mouth had been just an isolated
incident – that it was a loner that had become lost and disoriented and
probably had smelled the peanut-butter cookies on my breath and crawled in.
The
next night, I took a basket of clothes into the laundry room so I could do a
load of washing. When I flicked on the light, I stopped and gasped. Ants were
scrambling everywhere – up the walls, across the floor, into the sink, swinging
on the chandelier (OK, so I don’t have a chandelier in the laundry room). The
place had been transformed into party central for ants. I ran and grabbed the flyswatter, then spent
the next 15 minutes swinging it at everything that moved.
I
then checked on the Internet to see if there was a natural method in which to
get rid of ants. The thought of spraying the house with pesticides didn’t
appeal to me. One website said that ants would not cross a line made of
cinnamon. Another said they wouldn’t cross a chalk line. So I rushed down to
the store and bought a big can of cinnamon and box of chalk.
When
I got home, I proceeded to draw chalk circles everywhere in the laundry room.
Then I filled the circles with cinnamon. It wasn’t long before a few ants
appeared. I sat there, holding my breath, waiting for them to approach the
chalk and cinnamon, and then make a hasty retreat back to wherever it was
they’d come from.
The
ants walked right across the chalk lines and then through the cinnamon. And
when my dogs came in and sniffed the cinnamon, they ended up having a sneezing
contest. I spent the next 20 minutes sweeping up the mess.
So
I went to the hardware store and bought three different brands of ant bait with
really fierce names like “Ant Combat,” “Deadex” and “The Enforcer.” All three
said they were guaranteed to kill an entire colony. The ants were supposed to
take some of the poisonous bait back to their queen and feed it to her. When
she croaked, all the other ants also would croak because their whole reason for
living – serving their beloved queen – would be gone. Sounded good to me.
The
directions said to locate the ants’ point of entry and put the bait there. It
said it would be easy to find their trail because they would be following each
other in a line from wherever they were entering – kind of like an ant safari.
Well,
I don’t know which sadist wrote those directions saying finding the trail would
be easy, because after pulling the washer and dryer away from the wall and
crawling behind there, and then removing everything from the cabinets under the
laundry sink and wedging myself under there, I was ready to feed the guy some
of his own ant bait.
I
finally located what I figured was the ants’ point of entry – an area in the
back corner of the inside of the cabinet under the sink, where I thought I saw
a couple ants’ heads poking out. I plunked down all three brands of ant bait
there. Then I waited.
It
wasn’t long before a procession of ants approached the bait – and I smacked
them with the flyswatter. That’s when
it dawned on me that if I swatted them, they couldn’t very well take the bait
back to their queen. So I forced myself to just sit there and do nothing –
which was torture. I mean, allowing
anything smaller than a dog to crawl around my house was completely against my
nature.
I
finally decided I’d probably feel less stressed if I didn’t watch the ants. So
as a distraction, I went out to the kitchen to have a snack – a toasted
blueberry bagel. I took the brand new package of bagels out of the cupboard and
immediately noticed something strange about them.
The
blueberries were moving.
The
package was full of ants. That did it. The
ants could party in my laundry room, crawl into my mouth, or swing like Tarzan
from the rafters, but when it came to messing with my blueberry bagels, well,
that was the final straw. The battle was about to turn into a full-scale war.
The
irony of the situation was that just the week before, I had found dozens of
dead bugs in my garage and had wondered what mysterious force had killed them
all. Now I was wishing that whatever it was would make a return appearance and
take care of the ants.
I
knew that if the ants were coming in through the cabinet under the sink, then
their main nest – and the Queen Mother – had to be somewhere in the basement.
And seeing that the only living things in the basement have six legs or more, I
decided it wouldn’t hurt anything if I sprayed some ant killer down there in
the area directly beneath the laundry room.
So
that’s what I did, cackling fiendishly as I sprayed. And I haven’t seen an ant
in the house since.
Now,
I just have to deal with the hornets’ nest in my mailbox.
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