The Ants Go Marching One by One

Five years ago we lived in Boston. We subleased an apartment from a family for the summer who didn't want to take any of their stuff while they were gone. This included food. They gave us the liberty to consume anything perishable.

Every morning as I was eating breakfast I would see an ant or two on the table. Only a short time went by before we discovered an ant trail at the base of one of the kitchen walls. This grossed me out. I quickly began to detest ants even more than the crickets that seemed to swarm our apartment grounds back in Arizona. I hated this even more than the commuter train only two car widths away from our abode.

I don't know how long the attempts to rid our apartment of ants went on before we discovered their home. They had eaten through the bottoms of more than a handful of cereal boxes and were living the high life. (Thus the few stray ants of the table top each morning.)

Each night I dreamt of ants crawling in our bed. I even convinced Travis a few times to turn on the lights in the middle of the night to help me find them.

Last week Travis came upstairs to tell me some bad news. I swallowed and braced myself for the worst. "There are ants at the bottom of the stairs." I am confident that only a small handful of others out there despise ants as much as I do. This wasn't the type of news I was prepared for but I think I took it pretty well. Ant huts work just like they say. Twenty-four hours (to the minute) after putting them in place the ants are magically gone. I must confess I don't feel sad at all. When the boys ask about it I just tell them, "They weren't invited."