I hate ants.
Oh, I know they’re useful for scavenging and cleaning up the forest floor.
I understand they serve a purpose in God’s world.
I don’t even mind seeing them outside. In fact, that’s where they belong.
Outside.
But for me, as for many, ants in the house drive me crazy!
Do they bother you?
Ants= Them, or even The Naked Jungle
The horror, for me, may have come through my father.
As a child, I could spend time with my father when he (rarely) sat down to watch a movie.
He was young, I was younger, and I don’t believe he thought through parenting well when we watched 1950s horror movies.
Them started it all.
It’s a “B movie,” that doesn’t wear well. It’s laughable to watch it now.
But, as a kid attending elementary school when we practiced dropping and covering during nuclear attack drills, the film terrified me.
The film’s premise: nuclear testing in the desert takes place near an ant colony.
The ants grow to giant size–bigger than a man–and set up a new nest in the tunnels along the Los Angeles River–which you can see from I-5 on the way to my grandmother’s house.
They had a cicada-type metallic sound in the movie and the whole thing scared me.
During this time we visited a friend’s cottage in the desert. Lying awake at night, I heard the same metallic sound. I was terrified.
But I never said anything. (Why don’t children say anything?) Instead, I feared insects, ants in particular.
Later, we watched Charleton Heston in The Naked Jungle.
The army ants in that movie devoured people, knocked down trees and stripped houses bare.
Yikes!
Ants in the Kitchen: California and Connecticut
Growing up in California, ants in the kitchen were a common problem.
We’d wipe down the counters with vinegar, shudder, and anticipate the next invasion.
We also set up ant stakes around the house in an attempt to keep them out.
I have no idea if that worked.
One of my relatives had a terrible problem and routinely sprayed down the entire kitchen with Raid.
Whenever I worked in that kitchen, I wiped down the counters first. Still, I shudder remembering all that poison.
Okay, the Connecticut variety was not as big as
“Carpenter ants,” my husband explained. “Completely understandable since the trees overhang the roof.”
We couldn’t cut down the trees, but at least they didn’t swarm like the California small black sugar ants.
Hawai’i: The horror returns
Ten years later we lived in Hawai’i with all sorts of insects.
Our Navy housing unit was a single wood plank deep–if you hammered a nail into a wall, it came out on the other side.
Jalousie windows lined all the outside walls.
It almost felt like we lived outside–which was fine in balmy weather.
However, the first thing we did was seal all the windows and cracks to keep the insects out.
We used 37 tubes of caulk on a 1400 square foot house.
And still the ants invaded.
We eventually traced it down. Because we had no drywall, the electrical outlets were boxes hammered onto the wall. The electrical lines to the outlets went through narrow square wooden tubes.
Those were highways for ants.
Somehow they came into the house with the electric lines and followed them until they exited at the outlet box.
Surprise!
All over the counters.
At one point we had seven different varieties of ants in our kitchen.
We had “microscopic ants,” tiny creatures you could hardly see.
Crazy ones were slightly larger and often ran in circles.
They came in red, fat and fuzzy, big and crunchy, grease and garden variety sugar ants.
Vinegar, spray, wash, scrub, clean–I was busy trying to keep the insects at bay.
Speaking of bay, I’d leave bay leaves out, hoping that would help.
It didn’t.
Drawing chalk lines around food? Didn’t work.
It was horrible.
How about a nest?
Someone in my community described how awful it was to find an ant nest in her house.
She couldn’t seem to describe it, however, well enough to make sense to me.
How could a nest be built in her kitchen without her knowing it?
“It happened over night, a mass of ants just appeared.”
I didn’t think about it again until I reached into the cupboard above the telephone to pull out the phone book.
But, instead of seeing the book, I saw a roiling dark moving ball in the very place I’d returned the book the night before.
They had built a nest in the phone book.
Screaming, I grabbed the book and ran outside where I flung it into the trash can.
The vacuum cleaner cleaned up the rest–and then the bag went into the trash.
I scrubbed, cleaned, cried and made sure to destroy any
I had never seen an insect in that part of the kitchen. Where did they come from?
Who knows?
A year later, I opened the pantry before dawn and pulled out a box of Cheerios.
And dropped it in horror.
Screaming hysterically, I bolted from the house into the yard, shaking.
My teenager ran out, bat in hand. “What’s happened? What is it?”
I couldn’t speak, I was crying too hard. I could only point.
What a guy. He pulled everything out of the pantry, vacuumed and cleaned.
“It’s safe to come in now, Mom.”
I never trusted the pantry again.
What does God think?
Proverbs 30:20:
The ants are a people not strong,
Yet they prepare their food in the summer.”
Proverbs 6:
6 Go to the ant, you sluggard!
Consider her ways and be wise,
7 Which, having no captain,
Overseer or ruler,
8 Provides her supplies in the summer,
And gathers her food in the harvest.”
You know what? I don’t care.
I just want them to stay out of my house.
How about you? How do you deal with ants?
Update: Last night in northern California the horror continues– I discovered them crawling out of the kitchen wall outlet. Perhaps that’s why the line has been tripping off?
As I used to tell the children: “Please. Just go outside.”
Tweetables
Ants: the horror and in real life. Click to Tweet
Them, The Naked Jungle and a horror of ants. Click to Tweet
Ants and the kitchen–why don’t they just stay outside? Click to Tweet
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