They come back. They always come back.
The bane of summer, they make their last creepy stand in late autumn. The falling temperature slows them to a torpid crawl. Soon the frost sends them retreating into their underground lairs, where they will slumber for many months, conserving energy.
When summer comes again, they will usethis stored energy to make life miserable for many people, and maybe for you – invading kitchens in throngs, milling around the slightest crumb with obsessive curiosity.
May is the time for preparation. You gather your arsenal and thoroughly mop all the floors – skirt the house with sweet, toxic powders, invest in sprays.
Still, they come – and rebuild. Soon, the entire yard belongs to them – nothing more than a grassy priming surface for their propagation mounds.
Even though they have never driven a car or studied trigonometry, they will inflict enormous discomfort on people who have. Through incredible persistence, they will thrive, invading cabinets, molesting the cat food dish, nosing around kitchen counters.
They have to eat, after all.
It only takes a lone, scouting ant to whistle for an entire mob of friends – with nothing more than a trace chemical signal. Soon they are a scene from a nightmare.
They bustle, they throng – hundreds of searching, peppery specks; sometimes they move randomly as a heaving mass; other times they march single file.
Routines are interrupted. At night you feed your cat from a plastic, airtight container, pouring it into a plastic bowl. As you do, something tickles the back of your hand. A quick glance; a few are cresting and descending the contours of your knuckles. You flinch. Panic. Blast the faucet. Rinse.
They fall, a drowning mass, into the drain.
There are more.
They are mounting the plastic cat food container; one by one, they vanish beneath a crack in the carelessly replaced lid.
The food is spoiled, crawling with hungry bugs; you have no choice – you throw it all away. They have colonized the cat food in the plastic dish as well; you blast it with water and watch the drain swallow them.
Ants appear elsewhere as days go by. At the sight of them, you must stop whatever you are doing to take care of the tiny menaces claiming your counters or floors.
You mop, clean every surface; you put all sugary temptations away in tightly shut cabinets. You even fill a pie tin with shallow water and embed the plastic cat food dish inside.
You sigh and congratulate yourself; the bugs cannot swim. By cleverly removing all temptations and creating a water barrier, you now feel safe.
The hairline crack in the bedroom air conditioner seal knows better. As you sleep, tiny invaders slide through the narrow opening; you never stir as they slowly climb the bedspread on a scouting mission.
In the morning, there is no sign of them – except for angry, itchy blisters that have appeared on your skin – and a few stragglers hiding inside carpet fibers and exploring the bedroom floor.
You strip the beds, wash the covers, vacuum the mattresses, and discover the hairline cracks, which you thoroughly seal.
When the invaders disappear, you wrongly assume they have given up – or died. The theory is ruined when you open a cabinet – and see a smattering of tree ants ascending your brand new package of sealed cat food, desperately searching for a way in.
In horrified amazement, you transfer the package to the refrigerator. A week goes by with no activity.
The lone ant at the back door fails to rattle you. At least it is not a hoard. You start to crush it with your foot and do a double take. You see a second – and it is crawling on your shoe.
Two more are mired in the doormat. No, three. No, ten. No – everywhere, a quivering pool of them on the floor and a stream of others climbing the sides of a garbage bag.
You saturate the floor with ant spray; finally, their movements become sluggish.
A few traumatized bugs escape the chemical blast – and hide from the first of many spray assaults. You want to use restraint, fearing the risks of poison, but a throng of bugs is intolerable.
As summer progresses, the ants erupt at different sites of the house. In one area they fade; in another, they appear. They sprout on the dining table and blossom inside the dishwasher. Only the bathroom remains a bug free oasis.
Your daily cleaning becomes compulsive. You rinse the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. You double line the garbage bags. You coat the floor in poison. Soon you have cleaned the house so much, there is nothing left they can want.
You are mistaken. They have devised a shocking, insanely bold new trick: the Table Run.
Their new strategy takes you completely off guard. You never see ants on the table during the day – but one night, during supper, one or two stragglers rush out from the underside of the table and make for the plate of warm food – a desperate, risky strategy that results in instant, crushing death.
After you spray the underbelly of the table, the risky maneuver ends.
Many weeks go by. No ants. Poison is almost everywhere. The house is spotless. Food is locked away in the refrigerator.
As summer ends, you let yourself forget about them; you focus on the charms of warm weather, the spectacular floral displays, the lingering sunlight.
When you go to wash your hands in the bathroom sink, you see them – a rippling, flourishing shell of them smothering your bar soap. Stragglers ascend the base of the ceramic dish. Others inspect the sink drain.
With mounting frustration, you spray poison on the only area that does not have it. The ants either perish or fade back into the walls. I cannot even have soap, you think.
In later days you sweep away dead ants from the kitchen floor where poison was sprayed. Lives ones, finally, no longer appear.
You are now ant free, but the summer has forced you into strange, unwanted habits: you compulsively rinse dishes; you fill a pie tin with water every night for the cat food dish; during the day, you scoop out the soggy fallen food morsels.
You have replaced bar soap with liquid. You double bag the garbage. You vacuum daily. You avoid leaving food on the table for more than a moment. Bugs tinier than the tip of a ballpoint pen have radically altered how you live your life. How much longer? You wonder.
A shift in temperature, timeless as the seasons, answers.
As daylight becomes shorter, they begin to fade too.
They have stuffed themselves – on your garbage, residue, cat food, and bar soap. Many of their friends have fallen, taken bold risks and paid a terrible price.
For now, their struggle is over. Their season has ended. As they disappear, you relax. For now, you have won.
The ants could argue. Despite their brief retreat, they have gotten what they wanted: the energy to live and spawn new countless generations of themselves. Desperate hunger has driven them to soaring heights of ingenuity. There is perhaps no opening they have not found, no crumb they have not explored, no energy source they have not tapped.
Unlike them, you have only wanted the comfort of a pest free home. Their drive was more compelling: starvation; a thwarted need to live; an instinctual intelligence – the primal, clawing, scraping genius of survival.
For now the mounds sink into the earth, as if they had never been there. Beneath them lie vast, secret labyrinthine depths – a magnificent network of tunnels spanning many miles.
Safe from snow, sleet, and freezing rain, they will draw on stored energy reserves from your garbage, cat food, and soap – as they wait for the time of warmth and resurrection when they will reclaim the world.