The Melting World

I am not an enemy of ants. As a child, I was a pro-active ant advocate: I would save their homes when the rain fell by frantically hopping with a battered black umbrella from ant hill to ant hill on our front sidewalk.

I have never willingly scraped an ant hill with my shoe, or stamped on one to death for fun either. I believe insects–even the creepiest of crawly ones–have a right to live, just like anyone else, as long as they keep off me and my family.

I am not a saint. I have had my episodes where I’ve single-mindedly slaughtered colonies of insects, such as my month-long battle with cockroaches in my shabby studio in Tuscaloosa. The time for war has (sadly) come again. I think the key factor is this: if they have invaded my living space in droves, then I transmogrify into a cold-blooded insect assassin.

Ants attacked us about a week ago, big ants, those black ones with the dusty three-piece shellac suits. We responded in two ways. I would pick them up and throw them out the window (this was not murder, I rationalized). My husband would trap them in a cup, slide a postcard underneath and then knock them out the window. Again, we chose the non-violent approach, and then kept the windows on that side of the apartment shut despite the heat. Victory was ours…

for a few days…but now we have an infestation, not of the large ants, but of tiny reddish brown ants, the kind that follow each other in swarmy lines across the window ledge, carpet and tatami mats. They are on an exodus into our home. My husband thinks they are the spawn of the big ants, and if so:

This is the revenge of the insects.

We are no longer potential peace prize recipients. My husband’s technique is to douse them with watered-down dish soap (I find this method disgusting due to the carcasses abandoned in pools of sticky fluid) or he sucks them up the vacuum cleaner and dumps them into the toilet and flushes repeatedly. My starting technique was the usual, pick them up and throw them out, which soon escalated into death by large human pinchers.

After they invaded my son’s toy room, however, I got mean, real mean. Now I swipe as many as possible with a wet paper towel and I have set out ant posion for them at night (when my son is not going to be interested in the pretty orange plastic squares that look like candy). The ant poison doesn’t seem to be tasty to these ants after the first unlucky few entered and keeled over, sigh, so the battle rages on.

Now, I am really not a fan of war (I despise group-think and the stupid lies told by rich people to justify killing poor people off for their insatiable greed), so the irony that I am now a mass-murderer of ants hasn’t escaped me. My question is: how did Buddha do it? Did he really just let those mosquitos have their fill? Did he let the ants gorge on his ricewater soup? Then why isn’t his bald head and lips depicted as they should be, with red swollen bites?