The Ants Go Marching

The ants are back. This time invading the pantry, which is where you would expect to find ants, rather than the medicine cabinet or the surface around the clean dishes where we found them last time. A few minutes earlier, I joked about the ants. “Haha, remember the ants?” Susan was making pizza dough. I was making blackberry pie. Our kitchen had been ant-free for three weeks. Three weeks since I sprayed my entire kitchen with aerosol cans of ant poison bought at Walmart; since I climbed into the earthen crawlspace below the kitchen, swatting away spiderwebs and hanging cotton candy hanks of insulation dangling from the floorboards above. An industrial tub of poison from Lowe’s with a battery-powered spraying wand allowed me to emulate the exterminator I see spraying quarterly at work—albeit without spiderwebs and insulation to navigate.

We’ve moved beyond freaked out and disgusted. Now we’re just pissed. I’ve never seen such ants. Tiny, almost microscopic. A family of them would fit on the head of a pin. When they crawl through the poison around the edges of the cabinets, they roll into minuscule balls and die, maybe the size of a grain of sand. Because of their size, they can go anywhere. Our first encounter with the ants: they squeezed into a sealed Tupperware container of Roz’s food, hundreds of them. It’s for diabetic cats, that stuff’s expensive—eighty-two dollars for a ten-pound bag. The Tupperware contained about a quarter of the bag.

I didn’t spray the pantry with the rest of the kitchen. Clearly, a mistake. This is where we keep our snacks, our bags of cat food and our rice. We’re obsessed with rice. We eat it with most meals. Jasmine or Basmati—if I had my way, it would always be Jasmine. To me, it tastes like candy. Even plain and cold straight from the fridge is a treat. In Gettysburg we can’t buy rice in bulk. We drive an hour to H-Mart, a Korean grocery chain in Frederick, Maryland to stock up. We just did this a couple of weeks ago. Two open twenty-pound bags of rice for the ants to invade, maybe eighty-dollars of rice.

Susan opened the pantry to grab a new jar of yeast. “Agh, more ants!” They swarmed around a box of Cheez-It crackers. She dropped the box in the sink, and I cautiously peered inside afraid of what I might find in there. Just last weekend, the whole family was traumatized by a similar pest experience.

After crockpotting a pork shoulder all day, I removed a half-inch thick layer of fat and shredded the pork for pulled pork sandwiches. I bagged up the fat and dropped it in the empty garbage can in my garage. This was two weeks ago on a Monday night. They collect the garbage on Monday mornings. By Wednesday, the garbage smelled so horrible, I moved the can out of the garage to the far side of our driveway. By Friday, I could smell the garbage as soon as I walked out my front door, thirty feet away. And by Sunday, maggots surrounded the garbage can, just like the ants surrounded the Cheez-Its in our pantry. I peeked inside the garbage can and found thousands of maggots writhing over the bag of fat at the bottom of the can. It took three of us a half hour to contain the maggots in a heavy-duty contractor bag and hose away the hundreds that escaped capture. The next morning when Susan left for work, she found a flock of birds happily pecking away in the grass next to our driveway.

I’m pleased to report, the number of Cheez-it ants didn’t top one hundred, and I easily washed them down the garbage disposal in the sink. To the best of my ability, I’ve scoured the rice, the cat food, the caramel popcorn and the restaurant style corn chips that shared the pantry with the Cheez-Its. As far as I can tell, the ants only attacked the Cheez-its. It couldn’t have worked out better for me. I don’t even like Cheez-its.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll climb back into the crawlspace for another round of extermination. Thankfully I bought the jumbo-size jug of poison. It looks like this might take a while to get under control.