January 30, 2008

Battling the Ants

It's not the meek who will inherit the earth. It's the ants--and they're anything but meek.

Ever since the rainy season started, we've been plagued with a never-ending parade of ants seeking a snack and a dry spot to sit a spell and commune with their colleagues.

Any time of the day or night, they can be found marching in formation across the kitchen counter, in the bathroom sink, on top of the nightstand or on the couch.

Now, before you call the health department on me, be advised that my house is clean. We don't leave food out. The floors are washed regularly. The sink is scrubbed every day.

My house doesn't look like those filthy dumps on the BBC America show "How Clean Is Your House?" If you haven't seen it, the show stars two no-nonsense broads who descend upon homeowners with washing soda and scrub brush in their rubber-gloved hands. While giving each owner a lecture on home hygiene, they scrub the place from top to bottom. The houses they choose are unbelievably filthy, with toilets that have not been cleaned for years and floors so dirty they have to be scraped with a putty knife. The tenants are regular folks with a serious lazy streak. The question in my mind is, how lazy to you have to be to allow your dirt to be shown on TV just to get someone else to clean it up?

You'd expect these pigsties to be infested with critters. Indeed, one episode I watched featured a house with a serious infestation. Ants were the least of their problems-they had rats eating away at their furniture.

In spite of the fact that my house LOOKS clean, I know that even a speck of something with sugar in it can attract ants. I've tried my best to eliminate temptation, but the wily little critters have supernatural powers.

One night I heard Keeper yelling in the bedroom and went to investigate. He had found a trail of ants from the window, up the leg of his dresser and into a drawer. He emptied everything out and still couldn't find what they were interested in. A more thorough examination revealed a linty roll of Lifesavers tucked into a jeans pocket. The scouts had struck gold and had sounded the alert: gourmet treat in the third drawer from the top.

It's a constant struggle. Last week I was watching TV and eating bread-and-butter pickles (doesn't everybody?). I set the jar on the table beside me and went to the kitchen for some water. When I came back 2 minutes later, the jar had become a vacation destination for a caravan of ants crawling up the lamp cord. The swifter ones had already started doing the backstroke in the pickle juice.

Why, you are asking yourself, don't we just carpet bomb them with ant killer? Well, I have very sensitive lungs. One drop of perfume can send me into a coughing fit; breathing in a cloud of Raid would do me in. Besides, wiping them out en masse with insecticide just isn't sporting. Hand-to-hand combat is much more satisfying. Wish me luck in tomorrow's Battle of the Kitchen Sink.