Ants Big & Bad

The house on Old Dixie Lane

Roofers came to replace a rusted sheet of tin on the roof, the part over my bedroom that’s been leaking the last few times we’ve had rain. Two guys climbed around on the roof a couple of days back and told me they would come back near the end of the week to do the work. Here they came at 8:30 this morning hauling the materials they needed to do the job and jumping right to it, a big section of the tin roof off inside an hour. Hard to believe but they finished the whole job by noon. The next rainstorm will tell the whole story but no reason to suspect the work was anything but a good job.

The gatepost of big ants

I was closing the gate after the two trucks pulled out and noticed a single ant scurrying up the gate post and couldn't believe I was looking at an ant. Bright red-orange and the size of a small grasshopper, half an inch long with two body sections as big and round as peas. Looked like something with a bite that could take down a full-grown man. With these beasts its both a bite and a sting, the bite to get a grip and the sting coming next from the ant's abdomen. Biggest ant I've ever seen, something you'd expect to see in the Australian outback or the Amazon jungle. 

Around here ants are always underfoot. Until she learned how to avoid the red ants, the dawg got stung a bunch of times. Not too long back I was on the way out the screen door on the back porch and saw a thick line of red ants flowing back and forth along the door edge of the rubber mat on the outside walkway. I pulled the mat away from the door and uncovered a swarm of what looked like two million ants hard at work building a nest in the doorway there on the concrete walk. I worked almost forty-five minutes to clear all the ants out of the doorway. I was out of ant spray so sprayed them with alcohol and Formula 409, ants running every which way, into the porch, up the walls and onto me when they were able. I went batshit over the fiery little devils trying to build a nest in my doorway and went overboard killing as many as I could, eventually crushing the stragglers with my thumb. I felt like a victim in that old movie I saw as a kid, the one where army ants—the dreaded Marabunta!—attack a plantation in South America. I think it was called The Naked Jungle.

While the guys were fixing the roof, neighbor Lamar came motoring down on his senior buggy to get help with something confusing about his health insurance. He has a condition that makes him flustered and angry when he doesn’t understand what’s going on. It’s one part of the MS (Multiple sclerosis) he battles most of the time and the doctor told him to avoid frustration and stress. Transportation was included in his insurance coverage, rides to and from his doctor appointments but they told him he got cancelled out of that benefit. He tried to call Medicare to see what the problem was but they made Lamar crazy with their foolishness. So he asked me to help. I spoke to four or five recordings and eventually three or four people and not a bit of it helped. An hour later someone did help and gave us a number to call about transportation. I called that number and someone said hello just when Lamar was on a streak, cussing loud about fools on the phone. I shushed him quick and we got the problem solved. Now Lamar has a renewed ticket to ride the medical van.

It’s part of the disease but Lamar’s brain gets rattled as the MS progresses. Repeats himself and says a lot of stuff that sounds hard to believe. He loves to recount stories of crime, screw ups, bitches, prison, drugs and murder. I think he's experienced in all but murder but I haven't heard the whole story. When we got done with the telephone business this morning he started telling me about a friend of his who sprayed a room full of people with a machine gun, went to prison and inherited a million dollars. Now does that sound logical or probable? One day coming back from the store we came up behind a police car on the road and automatically Lamar said, "That's probably the som’bitch that arrested me last time." That Lamar, he’s a caution. 

Lamar’s trailer in the woods