The Ants

The Ants

This is the story of how my marriage almost ended after only a couple of weeks.

In November 1960 we were newlyweds living in our little duplex apartment in Killeen, Texas. Mac, who was in the Army, was out for several days and nights on field maneuvers. I was playing house with all my new dishes and pots and pans, trying to be such a good little housewife. Everything was clean and neat as a pin, and that’s why I was shocked and horrified one rainy morning to wake up and find ants all over the top of the stove. They were still coming, a line of them climbing up one side of the stove, then when they got to the top, scurrying around everywhere. There was no food on the stove so I don’t know what was attracting them.

I just knew they were horrible and unwanted, and I killed them as fast as I could, just using a wet dishcloth, squishing them and wiping them up. I rinsed the dishcloth over and over until all the ants were gone, then scrubbed the entire stove with detergent.

Later that day I saw the two young school teachers who lived in the other side of the duplex. I mentioned the ants and they said they, too, had had ants on their stove this morning. They cleaned them up the same way I had, then they sprayed bug spray all around the baseboards of the room. I didn’t have bug spray, so they let me use theirs, and we all hoped we had taken care of the problem.

The next morning, there wasn’t a single ant on the stove. There was, however, a line of ants on the counter by the sink and heading up into the cabinets. I opened the cabinet and found ants all over a can of Crisco and a bottle of pancake syrup. Both had been opened once and re-closed, but I’d wiped them off before returning them to the cabinet. I was shuddering in disgust and dismay as I pulled everything out of the cabinet to wash it off. After everything was super clean and the last ant was down the drain, I called the lady who owned our house, telling her she needed to send an exterminator.

She said she knew all about the ants, which come inside when it rains. “Killeen,” she said cheerfully, “is built on an ant hill.” She promised to come over and spray outside the house around the foundation, but not until after it stopped raining. In the meantime, I should just be careful to put all food away very carefully, which is what I thought I had been doing.

The school teachers next door said they had found ants that morning on their sink and cabinets just as I had! They were glad I had called the landlady but really doubted there was much she could do. Apparently people in Texas had just learned to live with ants coming in when it rained.

I was feeling terribly sorry for myself. This, I thought, was NOT what I had signed up for. I got married for better or for worse, but not for ANTS. Maybe my mother was right, I was too young to be married and keeping house after all. I was in tears over how soon my marriage was going to end, all because I couldn’t deal with a daily ant invasion of all my clean cabinets and dishes.

Well, of course, I didn’t get a divorce over the ants. I bought ant spray. I cleaned up everything as scrupulously as I possibly could. I put just about every bit of food into the refrigerator so there would be nothing to attract them. But at certain times every year while we were in Killeen, when we had a couple of rainy days, we would have a line of ants marching somewhere in the house. And I dealt with them. After all, I had promised “till death do us part,” not “till insects come into my house.”