the wild indoors

I am one of the more tolerant people I know when it comes to living creatures in my house that are not requiring braids or warm milk, or sex 2 nights a week minimum. I mean bugs, in particular. Right now, we are having the common summer problem of tiny ants in our kitchen. (Don't we all have those?) I seem to remember being overrun by them in my previous home, especially in the kitchen, and squirting them with my homemade peppermint soap and ammonia solution which would just slow them down. They just kept coming.

Today, after killing about 400 before 10 am, my husband angrily said "where the f--k are they coming from!!!???" Let's see, could it be the hairline crack in the window above the sink, a mere 4 inches from where we find them each day? Quite possibly, could it be that they are actually sneaky enough to climb up the wall outside and in through the 6 inch long gash in the screen that you made a few months ago when trying to install it? Is he completely serious? I do not believe in bait or renegade poisoning. Something about both just seems pointless. Bait? I want MORE ants to come? And poison is something I consider very carefully these days. I always ask myself now, where does this stuff end up? I mean, REALLY end up? Have you heard about antibiotics turning up in trace amount in drinking water? You get my point.

We have quite a bevy of multi-legged creatures in this house. I have just begun to truly accept that we all coexist and to barely respond when gutteral cries from the basement playroom of "SPIDER!" and I have been know to casually watch a silverfish swerve across my desk as I write. There are some stories, however, that will forever impact how I look at certain bugs...ticks, for instance. They seem to bring on an immediate panic, as if, without warning, they will lash out at you and instantaneosly give you Lyme disease. I of course know that the ticks that give you Lyme are miniscule and need to be imbedded for 24 hours before you would contract the illness. The thought of having a bug with it's head bored into my skin is not appealing whatsoever, but I think it is the story of my friends son Henry that takes the Bug Academy Award. Picture this:

We are out for a fine day of sun and fishing on our friends boat. Grandma is home with Henry, a freakishly large, wide-eyed and sweet 9 month old son of Derek and Lulu, our hosts. As the story goes, Henry is crawling around, happily cooing at his stuffed animals and Mega Legos et cetera and Grandma is sipping Barry's tea and reading the Times and occaisionally getting down on the floor with him to coo back, or smell his diaper. At one point, she looks up at him, and his face is covered with blood...down his chin, on his chubby fingers and smeared in his hair. Fenway, the chocolate Lab, circles curiously and gives him a lick across the face. Grandma panics and picks him up. No cries, no signs of distress, no visible cut anywhere. What could this be? She curiously cleans him, slightly panicked, totally confused, when he revels from his mouth the remains of an engorged tick. Fenway appears nonplussed. Grandma is mortified. On the other end of the cellphone, somewhere off the coast of East Hampton, I am gagging not from seasickness, but from the "oh how disgusting" factor. Perhaps you are too.

So today, after I brushed a few ants off my peach and killed another spider in the playroom, I went outside and picked a few plump juicy sawfly larvae off of my hibiscus plant and fed them to the bluebirds. I squished the rest between my fingers and crushed a few Japanese beetles too, but truth be told, the bugs are always going to win. There will always be more of them than us, unless we Hiroshima them with God knows what. I am not willing to do that, so I will continue to share my peach with the ants, laugh at my husband and my neighbors for thinking they can win the battle and to think of some of the worst-case scenarios, like Henry's, and be grateful for what I have not.