Ant Jihad (with apologies to E. O. Wilson)

At first, only a few scouts showed up in the mudroom. They ran discreetly along the base of the walls, and I was not alarmed. "It's a sign of spring" I said to the cat Telemann. I have never begrudged the occasional ant a few crumbs from my table. Ants don't frighten me the way spiders do, and I admire their work ethic and organizational talents. But soon those scouts were followed by an entire army, an army that was marching towards the litter box.

The litter that I provide for Telemann is the most ecologically pure on the planet, free from artificial scents, and made of corn. It gives off a mild sweet smell, which is so lovely that when I add fresh handfuls to the box Telemann has been known to take a taste. Now it looked like, along with the rest of America, my ants were addicted to corn-based sugars, and had sent a colonizing army to ensure an endless supply of the stuff.

In the past, I had dealt with ant incursions with a spray of water mixed with a few drops of dish soap. This not only killed the ants, but destroyed the pheromone trail that led others in their wake. It was simple; it was green; and it always worked.

I happened to have a bottle of the solution in the cabinet under the sink. I gave it a good shake, and sprayed along the ant column. The little creatures scurried out of the way, trying to avoid the deadly spray, then curled up in agony and eventually dwindled to little black motionless specks, and I felt like a vengeful deity wreaking havoc on hapless mortals. It was a miniature version of the kind of spectacle that I cannot bear to watch on TV.

The soapy solution worked for a while, but soon new battalions of ants arrived, and were making off with golden nuggets of corn litter. I sprayed more abundantly this time, leaving little slippery pools on the linoleum, then refilled my bottle and resprayed. But back in the nest the ant draft boards were calling up fresh recruits, and the army kept coming.

I googled DIY ant repellents. The techniques ranged from spreading coffee grounds on the ant trails, to smothering the insects under a paste of cornstarch and water. But the most popular solutions involved the use of essential oils, especially peppermint.

I happened to have a bottle of peppermint oil left over from an unsuccessful attempt to discourage field mice in pre-Telemann days. These being desperate times, I ignored the instructions to dilute the oil with water or witch hazel, and sprinkled the concentrated oil directly on the ants.

As with the soapy water, the results were instantaneous, at least for the ants that came in contact with the oil. The mudroom was now littered with tiny cadavers, which I left in the hope of demoralizing the troops, but more still kept coming. I sprinkled more oil. 

“What on earth is that smell?” my spouse asked. “It makes my eyes water.” Not only did the entire house smell like a bag of cough drops, but I was starting to worry about the stuff’s effect on Telemann’s willingness to use the litter box. When he was a kitten and I was trying to keep him away from a certain house plant, I had bought a bottle of cat repellent. Its main ingredient was peppermint oil.

If the ants were attracted by the corn-based litter, the obvious solution was to switch to a different litter. But I didn’t want a different litter. I wanted to stick with my ecologically pure brand, and I didn’t want to disturb Telemann’s bathroom habits.

I returned to the DIY sites, some of which sang the praises of white vinegar. I happened to have a gallon of it, which I had bought in a vain attempt to control static cling in the laundry. I dumped the soap solution out of the spray bottle and replaced it with vinegar. The ants were no longer marching in columns, but had broken ranks and were crisscrossing the mudroom floor, raping and pillaging. The ones dispatched to colonize the kitchen had reached the cabinets, in search of the toaster.

I flooded the mudroom and the kitchen with vinegar. Again, several ants perished on the spot, but more took their place, ready to give their lives for corn litter. Now the house smelled like a salad bowl. I was opening windows to air out the place when a friend came by. I apologized for the smell and told her my sorry tale. “Why don’t you just get some ant bait?” she said.

And so I did. I hid six cookie-shaped, non-green, non-DIY bait dispensers in various spots in the mudroom and kitchen. Within two days, the ants were gone.

Ant bait consists of an attractant that is also a poison. The ants carry it back into their nest, where eventually it exterminates the colony. The EPA allows the manufacturers to keep the inert ingredients secret from the consumer. Who knows what environmental outrage my ant baits perpetrated? Perhaps a titmouse ate a poisoned ant, and got a stomach ache, or even died.

Should I have persevered with the oil and vinegar? Should I have switched to a non-organic litter? Should I have learned to coexist with my ants, and if so, how bad would things have gotten? Would they finally have had their fill of cat litter and left of their own accord, or would they have turned our cottage into a giant ant hill, like those termite mounds in Africa?

The alacrity with which I jumped on the ant bait solution has humbled me, and softened slightly my attitude towards pesticide-spraying farmers and wolf-shooting ranchers. I still don’t approve of what they’re doing, but I now know that there lurks in my supposedly green heart the same hot rage that fuels their abuses.

A Winter's Worth Of Wort

In Vermont, people spend much of the summer preparing for winter.  They garden obsessively, and then they can, freeze, dry, pickle and jell the harvest.  They scour the countryside for sources of well-cured hay for their goats, horses, donkeys, llamas and sheep (people who have cows usually grow their own hay).  And they chop, split and stack wood into piles that are viewed with as much admiration as the rows of canned beans, tomatoes and apple sauce in the pantry.

I do a little of all the above, though now that my goats are gone my hay hunt is limited to what I use for mulch and chicken bedding.  But these activities only address the body's needs, for warmth and nourishment.  This year, I wanted to address the needs of the mind and heart as well.

Even when the vegetables are canned and the freezer is full and the wood is stacked, Vermonters shudder slightly at the thought of  winter:  the long dark evenings and the sporadic isolation that the weather imposes on even the hardiest souls.  At one time or another, between November and March, most of us complain of winter blues, cabin fever, seasonal affective disorder and generalized Weltschmerz.

Saint John's Wort  has long been revered in Europe as a remedy against moderate depression, PMS, insomnia, SAD, OCD, and a number of other ills .  I've always liked it that this plant, with its supposedly cheering effects, looks so cheerful, from its bright yellow flowers to its blood-red sap.

I like it so much that this year I went slightly overboard.  I filled a couple of big trash bags with flowers and leaves and macerated them for a month in two half-gallon jars filled with the cheapest vodka I could find.  Yesterday I gave them a final shake, strained the contents through cheese cloth, and decanted the wild-looking red tincture--the mere sight of which made me feel instantly energized--into bottles:

I threw the extremely alcoholic vegetable detritus into the chicken house and waited around to see what the hens would do.  They sniffed it and turned away in disgust, but the stuff will make terrific compost anyway.

With more than I could possibly use of the potent tincture at hand, I feel well armed against winter--practically looking forward to it, in fact.  I can see myself now, dispensing largesse from the top of our hill, squirting dropperfuls of the red panacea onto the tongues of melancholy friends...

(To those of you who are knowledgeable about herbs:  do not be disturbed by those bottles in the sunny window.  I  put them there just for picture-taking purposes.  I have since stowed them safely in a darker place.)

DIY Christmas

I got into the habit of making Christmas gifts by hand during my penurious graduate school days, when dollars were few and relatives were many.  My father in law, who liked to encourage my domestic side, which he saw threatened by my academic leanings, had given me a sewing machine, and it became my weapon in the annual battle to produce tangible objects without spending money.

The Christmas after I got the sewing machine I made him a shirt.  Intended to be worn outside the pants, the shirt was rust-colored and Nehru-collared, with a generously wide trim around the collar and cuffs.  Granted, this was in the early seventies, but what was I thinking, giving such a garment to a strait-laced engineer in his late forties?  Needless to say, I never saw him wear it.

A more successful DIY gift was a  reclining Snoopy-type dog that I made for my older daughter's first Christmas.  The pattern was complicated, and the fur-like material wreaked havoc on the sewing machine, but somehow I pieced it together, and my husband stuffed it with cotton until it was as firm as a rock.  This dog, which was as large as the baby herself, was much loved, and grew gray and dull with age, but  the seams held to the end.

The days when I could sit up half the night making gifts are long gone.  But every summer, when the lavender and the roses and the many mints are in full glory, I pick masses of them, tie them in bunches and hang them by the windows to dry, thinking what fabulous potpourri they will make for Christmas.

In the fall, when I should be stripping the dried leaves and flowers from the stems and mixing them with essential oils so they will have a good two months to ripen before the holidays, I am too busy dealing with the garden produce to even think about potpourri.  I usually forget about it until a couple of weeks before Christmas, and then in a panic I strip and blend and oil, and hope for the best.

This year, I'm making sachets.  Yesterday I got my sewing machine out of the deep recesses of the closet where it lives and made a bunch of little bags out of bits of leftover fabric.  At the last possible moment, I will fill these bags with the half-ripened potpourri, tie a ribbon around the opening, and present them with a flourish. 

The recipient will thank me, sniff the little bag, close her eyes in appreciation.  Then, probably, she will sneeze. And I will bow my head and smile self-deprecatingly, as I inwardly congratulate myself on my thrift and industry.