Monday, June 3, 2013

The Pyramids of Babylon

 by: Joan Hitz


During my newly-employed, post-collegiate twenties, and long-enduring, apartment-renting thirties, I managed to accumulate an undulating amoeboid mass of junk, which spent nearly thirteen years shifting from one random corner to the next in the rentals in which I dwelled. 
When I finally moved to my first house, I drove my station wagon while a moving van,  carrying the amoeba, followed. Box by box, in my new living room in Babylon, the amoeba took up residence, and, a new and permanent form. As a pyramid.
During my entire first year contending with the wonders of rookie homeownership (the mortgage and two jobs to support it), I managed this pyramid by ignoring it. Each morning, on my way to the kitchen for coffee, I side-stepped the pyramid, and again, out the door, to work. (The coffee pot was the first artifact I excavated from the heap.) 
For twelve months, while I labored sleeplessly, the pyramid endured, and annoyed, until one weekend, in a fury of desecration, I relocated this ageless Pile of Everything into the teeny back bedroom until such future decade when I could relocate its contents to more suitable repositories within the home. 
And so, during year two, as need arose - Making pancakes? Missing spatula? - I’d brave archeological expeditions to this backroom pyramid (which now more closely resembled the time-weary buttes of the Dakota Badlands) to find things.
I’d squeeze through the door and, with increasingly deft footwork, rise onto one big toe, curl up the other leg like a flamingo inspecting its undersole for barnacles, then insinuate myself over the tottering fishtank, around the sideways dish drainer, between the glass picture frame and frosted pink lampshade, and, finally, down onto the dollar-sized rectangle of floor very near to where I supposed the spatula to be hiding within a sealed cardboard box.
Then I’d rip open the box and discover ... a complete set of Little House on the Prairie books left over from age twelve. And no spatula. Reversing the flamingo, I’d snatch a prairie book and retreat to IHOP for breakfast.
One day, in my snake-like-flamingo-like position, while scouring for more historical remnants, my eyeball parked its vision on the rotted wooden ledge of the backroom windowsill. Just at its edge, a mysterious pyramid of its own had sprung up. 
Oh, I’d seen it before (and ignored it, conveniently assuming that windowsills routinely grew their own pyramids). But this time, the pyramid had a movable part. 
Remember grade school insectology?  Head, thorax, abdomen? Well, here, then, was a highly-polished jet black specimen of head-thorax-abdomen. A carpenter ant. On the sill. 
He must have misplaced his spatula and gone searching his pyramid, because at the moment he was methodically grasping with his jaws, and discarding, piece by piece, the particles of the miniature windowsill pyramid. With horrified fascination it occurred to me that this pyramid was, in fact, a dumping station for the ... um ... (no delicate way to put this) abdominal extrusions of the ant-burb (it dawned with further horror) which must dwell in high population within the window casing.
Oh.
That’s what that pyramid meant.
Did I do anything immediately?  Well ... no. Of course not. As I was still scrambling for the mortgage, and swamped in bills, instead of using an expensive exterminator I used  denial. Seemed fitting, so close to pyramids ...
In that afternoon’s current realm of spatula-lacking, mortgage-scrambling reality, one little ant on one little windowsill did not qualify as an ant problem. I shut the door on Little Egypt until such time as denial overflowed its banks and the ants became a more visible part of the decor.
Uh huh.
The third spring, denial overflowed. Under the kitchen sink. In the room next to the pyramid room. Even a constituency in the living room. Living.
BIG ants. Lots of them. And little ones, too. 
“‘Pavement ants,’” said the exterminator.  “Squash ‘em and they smell like fruity coconut.”
He did indeed conduct a diagnostic smush test which gave a whole new meaning to “scratch and sniff.”  
$1200 later, like most Long Islanders, I still had an ant problem, albeit a greatly reduced one. And thanks to one philosopher, among the slew of exterminators making monthly control visits to my home, I also received a lesson in ant psychology.
“To an ant,” explained Ant(hony), “your house is nothing ... but a big wet log.”  
Ah. Really. My home was a wet log. If I’d have known it was that easy, I would’ve just set up camp in the woods and skipped the mortgage part.
But it was too late for that. I had the mortgage. I had the wet log. And so, I followed Anthony’s tips and began to dry it out.

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