Ants in your coffee
It happens. You raise the steaming mug to your lips, and notice a covey of tiny black things floating on the surface of your coffee, your first for the morning.
Oh yes, you recall how you had failed to lock down the lid of the clear-glass mason jar, Arc from France, and how this persistent army of really tiny ants have of late taken all the little windows of opportunity to get under your skin.
A few months back, it was a trail of larger black ants that had you harking back to a traditional prescription you learned an era ago from your Lola Vicky. Good old salt. Placing rock salt on ants’ pathways either fended them off or made them disappear in time.
Your driver who also serves as all-around butler marvels over that item of kitchen lore. You’re surprised he didn’t know about how rock salt repels the crawling critters. They usually materialize at the start of the rainy season. Maybe they’re driven indoors because their ground colonies have been flooded.
And so it works. The line of rock salt serves as a modest protective wall demarcating the counter area where stand the coffeemaker and glass jars with brown sugar and Coffeemate creamer (“The Original”). The honey jar still sits on a small saucer with water, however. It has to have a special moat, else the black ants devise a way of catapulting themselves past the first line of defense that’s the trail of salt.
Such are the quaint quibbles of the quotidian, as symbolic sine qua non of daily living. On a larger scale is the struggle past the weak jokes on imminent global recession. In your microcosm of home, there are petty little quandaries that need quick resolution.
Finally that coffee counter area turns chaste, effectively shorn of extra-domestic transgressors. For weeks this pristine condition prevails. But when habagat gives way to amihan, and the cool breezes of Nick Joaquin’s late October are followed by the welcome chill at around Advent, a different army surfaces to disturb your sense of order.
This time it’s minuscule black ants, collectively cute, except that they attack anything that hints of sustenance. Leave a teaspoon with a trace of creamer or sugar, or any coffee drop on a saucer, and they’re into it in a minute. Your supply of paper towels turns subject to easy depletion.
You learn to keep everything spotless, make sure to properly apply the mechanical lock on the mason jars. But the little orcs turn desperate and initiate a trail up a wall and into a cupboard where a bag of brown sugar, still sealed, waits for its turn at replenishment. Your son discovers that they have bored a hole in one corner of the plastic bag marked SM Bonus. They’ve been having their just dessert for days. Now that plastic bag has to resettle inside the ref.
Sometimes you or the son may have been too much in a hurry to seal the jars shut. The tiny ants find a way to slip through the closed lid, and the next time you make coffee, there’s that black flotilla on the surface of your waker-upper.
There’s a day where you have to pour out the brown sugar into a tray to allow the ants a disarray of escape routes. You wipe them off the edges, palm them wetly into the sink, perish Buddha’s noble notion of all life being sacred.
These are trespassers, invaders, potential colonizers, after all, that not only have to be repelled, but be wiped off the face of your own existence.
As for the floaters, quick dabs of tissue paper fish them out. And sometimes you don’t mind ingesting little black ants along with your coffee.
They’re a wonder, really. When you make sure of proper closure for jars’ lids, and no sweet stuff remains in the cupboard, you discover a few of them having managed to straggle right inside the microwave oven. That can only mean that its insides have to be wiped meticulously clean of any splatter from leftover adobo or caldereta.
The son says the ants are too tiny to be microwaved. It doesn’t affect them at all. He’s learned as much from a lazy experiment when he had to reheat a burger well past midnight.
Is that right, you say, instantly rating such survival skills as being comparable to the legendary indomitability of cockroaches. You can only keep them down so much. The best safeguard has been the roach chalk from Baygon, which you apply fortnightly on the floors around the edges of kitchen counters, alongside doors, at the foot of the stairs.
Between salt and pest-killer chalk, you build up these little versions of a Hadrian’s Wall all around the domicile. It’s all part of living in the fertile tropics, the way highlanders devised ratguards around the wooden posts of their raised huts.
Changes in weather also have something to do with pestilential onslaughts. In the dry coolness of December, you’re suddenly bothered by flies in your sala, dining room and kitchen.
The driver thinks it may have been caused by the half-sack of horse manure he had wheedled off a garden soil seller and stored in a corner of the carport. But they don’t buzz around there. Instead they find a way to enter your living and dining quarters, and even when you keep all doors and windows closed, and conduct regular swatting practice, they don’t appear to get decimated at all for several days.
Maybe it has something to do with the simbang gabi devotion as practiced by neighbors before dawn. How is that, sir? asks the butler. You don’t bother to explain your regard for religion and nocturnal ceremonies. You simply keep an eye out for candy wrappers tossed by kids on the roadside around the village.
But just as they appeared in great numbers, one day before Christmas they are gone. You thought they’d stay on for noche buena all around the neighborhood, or for all the trash generated by nightly socials before the garbage trucks come by every other day. And yet one late morning as you start your coffee routine, and pick up a flyswatter to while away the brewing time, voila! There’s not a single flying or landing prey.
What there is left to repulse is a small mouse that frolics in the kitchen area when the humans are asleep. Evidence is the bitten-off corner of a plastic bag sealing in your last Kopi Roti bun. You ask a supermarket attendant for a mousetrap. What they have is the metal cage with the spring door. Okay, no squishing and no blood.
The driver-butler sets the trap, hooking up a piece of queso de bola as bait. In the morning you find a new pet rendered safe inside the contraption.
And that is how it goes at the turn of another year, ringing out the old, ringing in the new, drowning a little mouse to protect hearth and home, and reflecting — while sipping coffee with tiny ants that come with the sugar — on the cosmic spirit of self-defense and your own hallowed instincts for survival.
