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Ants Attack

© Sharon Wren

I think I need to stop watching kids’ movies; they’re messing with my sense of reality. I see deer tracks down by the river and think, “oh, Bambi’s happily romping in our yard.” In reality, Bambi’s probably cussing me out for having the hostas so close to the dog run (I’m not always brain dead, it just seems that way sometimes). I see the ducks hanging out by the bird feeder and think “look at the cute ducky-wuckies”. Given half a chance, those ducks can and do trample the flower garden. And then there’s the ants.

Ants are one of those creatures that everybody’s had some experience with. Go to any area – large, small, metropolitan or country – and you’ll find ants. Ok, I’m pretty sure they’re not in Antarctica and maybe not in the desert, but they’re just about everywhere else. I went to school with a girl who used to eat ants; she also used to lick the grease off her dad’s boots. I’ve never had them ruin a picnic, but I’ve been bitten by red ants a few times. For the most part though, ants and I have a “who cares” attitude about each other.

That was until we put in the rose garden. Our house had almost nothing in the way of plants when we moved in and as a gardener, I knew it couldn’t stay that way for long. Earlier this year my husband gave me a shopping spree in the Jackson & Perkins rose catalog (!) and we planned our garden. It runs in front of our house, from the driveway to the front door. The thinking was that I’d have these lovely flowers to send me off to work and to greet me after a hard day. So before the roses came, I started digging up the yard. That’s when the trouble started.

First I used a spade, but my lousy back made that pretty tough (it’s amazing what a toddler will do to your back), so I switched to my trowel. I was making decent progress when I uncovered the anthill. We had just watched “Antz” a couple nights before and as I watched them scurry about, I wondered “gee, wonder which one is Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman”, etc. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention until I felt a stinging, pinchy kind of feeling on my leg. I just figured I’d been stung by a mosquito, so I kept going. When you live on a river, you eventually stop noticing mosquito bites. But then I felt it again. And again. “What the…” I looked down at my arm and there were maybe a dozen ants. The little buggers were on the attack! I didn’t know black ants bit. Surprise! I brushed them off and went back to work. They picked themselves up and went back to work too – back to biting me! The next three feet of digging was pretty slow going, what with having to stop every two minutes and de-ant myself.