Under Attack

Wednesday February 2, 2011

I am under attack - again. This is not the first time this year that my Costa Rica home has been marching grounds for thousand of industrious little ants. I didn’t write about it last time not because it wasn’t remarkable but rather because I was so appalled and disgusted by my living circumstances.

Last time was different: I saw some ants, figured they would swarm in, do their thing, and be gone, taking with them any bug carcasses and crumbs they had encountered. I was so wrong. They came, they stayed, they clumped into a healthy grape fruit sized mass at the seam in the wall of my entryway. What did I do? Nothing, at first. I was too horrified to react. After a day I sprinkled Gold Bond athlete foot powder, the closest thing to Borax I could find, in the doorway to my bedroom and living room. Because, you know, ants can’t climb walls. The pulsing mass only grew.

Then, I gave up. I stuck my head in the sand. I lived with the repulsive mass for days, pretending it was not there. Ugh. I don’t even want to think about it.

Eventually, after about a week, the mass went away, leaving behind only the spent shells of hundreds of colony members, sprinkled neatly along the foot of the wall.

This time it is different. It started on Saturday with a gentle stream of much smaller ants parading out of a crack in the floor by my front door. They were almost cute in their precision. Almost.

I was dismayed. Again? I don’t want it. I was then struck by an idea – an idea I took to be divine intervention. I heated water in the kettle and filled the ant hole with boiling water a la Grandma Barnes weed control on the front walk.

I walked around all day with my chest puffed out. Not a single ant came back out of that hole. Boy, I sure was feeling good about myself. Fast forward to Tuesday night when I discovered a stream of ants coming from the space between the wall and the floor under my bathroom sink. This is the same space that Julia and I had shoved a wad of clear tape into last May to keep out the scorpion we saw escape via that route.

I’m getting tired of this story, so let me just say that it didn’t work as well (at all) this time (times) and now I have
1) boiled ant bodies and gritty cement wall crumbs spread across the bathroom floor, where they floated to when I splashed boiling water at them and
2) ants flowing steadily to and from who knows where.
And again, I give up. They can win.