On Bugs

Country living (for that is what I will call it even as people mock me for considering Greenwich, CT the country) has developed sympathies I never knew I had, and hierarchies I never thought existed.

As the weather has gotten lovely, I have noticed something troubling. Members of the outside world have been creeping inside. Specifically ants. Now, it's not actually very many, perhaps 5 in two weeks, and they're not congregating anywhere specific, and they don't seem to travel in packs. 5 single ants. Just hanging out. All five have met a sole-y end. I do not suffer ants in my house, however bucolic they might be.

In the past two days, however, I have seen two spiders. They have been permitted to remain even as they put up structural edifices that would make Frank Lloyd Wright jealous. Because here, in the country, spiders are good. Nay, spiders are awesome. Spiders are that which destroy ants and any other thing that I might not want in or near my home. The bigger the spider the better. I want to see spiders in webs trapping and digesting the hornets I have spied from time to time. May they live long prosperous lives feasting on the mosquitoes that would feast on me (and our lawn which can politely now be called a swamp is, I would assume, teeming with the bloodsuckers). Spiders are friends. They are my front line. They're out there, every day laying mines in the battlefield for mine enemies to fall upon. We're copacetic, man.

I'm not quite certain how any of our visitors gains entrance, but I do know that the spiders were there from Day 1. As someone who is if not bug averse than bug prefer-them-to-be-elsewhere, learning to live with my spider friends took surprisingly less long than I would have imagined. Certainly we had some boundary issues: I'm looking at you daddy long legs who descended in front of my face as I opened the door to the garage - not cool, but now we live in harmony.

Now I need to develop ways of targeting their activities in the areas that need it most (like that space beneath the front door that I saw the hornet fly into (though perhaps it was a spider lair which would be way cool)).