My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Bug Off!

As far as my husband, Ed, is concerned, the greatest thing about the Great Outdoors is that it remains outdoors. In particular, Ed hates ants.

“I don’t hate ants,” Ed will insist. “I just want them to live in their own houses. I don’t go barging into their homes uninvited, do I?” Ed would have you believe that it’s a matter of etiquette, of shoddy ant manners, and that if we’d gotten to know the ants, come to think of them as our friends, he’d be happy to have them over. Six thirty, then? Great! Will the soldiers be coming or just the workers?

I tell him to ignore them, because they’ll be gone when the rain ends and their homes stop flooding. I care about drowning ants because once I left my cousin’s Ant Farm outside when it rained, and the farmers all died. I guess I’m still working through the guilt. Whatever the reason, I think of our kitchen as a port in the storm, an ant refugee camp, providing crumbs and shelter in time of need.

Ed just wants to slay them. And there are products on the market to help him do this. They tend to come in two categories. The first appeals to the man who loves a good battle, especially one where the enemy is unarmed and the size of Wheatena. These products have names like Maxforce and the aggressive if ungrammatical Real Kill.

Ed knows better than to try to get UN approval for this sort of thing. He knows I believe in a humane, organic approach. I once got Ed to stop killing the spiders in our bedroom by telling him the spiders eat the ants. Of course, this isn’t true. Unlike humans, spiders are no good at what my mother used to call “drawing ants.” They do not leave wet Popsicle sticks on windowsills or open honey jars out on counters. Ed bought my theory, but only for a while. I’d come into the room and see him on his hands and knees in the corner, inspecting the webs. “If I don’t see ants by Friday, you’re in trouble, my friend.”

Pesticide companies understand the husband-wife ant dynamic. Many have a separate line that emphasizes the nontoxic quality of the products, which is quite a bold marketing move for what is essentially a weapon of mass destruction.

One company tries to make ant death seem like a holiday in France. They have a product called Ant Café, so that rather than picturing the little guys gasping and writhing, you picture them sipping bowls of café au lait, smoking Gitanes and leafing through Le Figaro, which is hard to do at the same time unless, like the ant, you have six hands.

The last spray bottle Ed brought home was a brand called Safer’s. He read to me from the label, pausing now and again to make ant pâté on the counter. “It combines bait with borax,” he said, as though this made any kind of sense, as though helping them have whiter whites had always been the idea. “Fresh Mint Odor, honey!”

I’ve never encountered this kind of fresh mint odor. Imagine smelling some mint that’s growing on the lawn of a petrochemical plant. It’s that kind of fresh mint odor. When Ed wasn’t looking, the Safer’s went away on a holiday in France.

For a long time, Ed didn’t say much about the ants and I thought he’d made his peace with them. Then I found some of those little ant cups that leak brown, sticky, evil stuff and do not match our décor. He thought I’d like this idea, because no spraying and dying-on-the-countertops was involved. “They take the poison home and die there!” Ed said cheerfully.

I did not like the idea and I said so. So we had a little argument about the ant cups. Things may have gotten a tiny bit out of hand. I may have threatened to get some “jerk cups” and put them out in the places Ed goes to feed. A door slammed at some point. The ants watched for a while, and then fled for their lives. We haven’t seen them since.