At this time of year, I am always on the lookout for the annual invaders of my house. I’m not talking about door-to-door salesmen or people with religious pamphlets. I’m talking about ants.

I don’t have much trouble with ants as a species. They seem to be industrious, tidy, efficient. They don’t really make any visible mess in the house. But I still don’t want them around. And every year, around this time, my house gets scouted out by dozens of them looking to expand their ant empires.

My house is in the middle of a giant anthill. If I go outside, my foot steps on an ant. The driveway always (except for during winter) has ants scurrying all over it. I think they use it as an international trade route.
My lawn is also peppered with mounds the ants have built. Now, the kids of ants out there are not like the ones that try to come into the house. Bigger ants try to come in and they are not actually living near the house, from what I can tell. The smaller ants that patrol my property seem to keep them away.

I am imagining ant wars with classic ant epic battle music playing.

I have made some rather pale attempts to fight back against the ants. Last year, I decided to take a shovel and dig down into one of the anthills to see what I could find. Needless to say, I found ants. Lots of ants. They were not happy about the shovel. They crawled all over it in an ant attempt to discern what it was.

I am imaging an ant science fiction scenario, where a big metal invader comes and haphazardly sweeps away eons of ant civilization to make room for a new alien civilization (perhaps a tree).

Once, when I was a child, I discovered a large ant hill. I took a large flat rock and dropped it on the hill and watched as the ants investigated every inch of it. I went back a few days later and the rock was gone. A little bit of scraping revealed they had, in fact, buried the stone under a thin layer of sand. I guess they thought it was useful or sacred.

I am imagining poor slave ants being driven by hard task-masters, each bringing one grain of sand up the steep slope of the sheer stone mountain.

I’m expecting my house to be buried any day.

My old friend Pete told me a story once about an ant situation he claimed happened to his uncle. Apparently, his uncle lived on a farm and had a major ant problem. Large areas of the ground were completely infested with ants. And every time his uncle went out to do some work on one of the farm machines, he’d be constantly brushing the ants off. For some reason, Pete said, pesticide didn’t work.
So, the uncle got progressively more and more irate as the ants took over more and more of his mind and he eventually came up with a way to treat the situation. He took two five-gallon cans of gasoline and started pouring it down into the biggest of the anthills. Once he had it all poured out, he went around and set fire to every one of them. He then, apparently, very gleefully watched the ground smoke.

Imagine the cries of horror from millions of ants as the flood of fiery death descends.

But then he noticed, much to his own horror, that his barn was burning.

Whether it was that the secret network of tunnels carried gasoline under the barn or that a select squadron of brave ants went forth and wrought hard revenge on the supervillain, no one could say.

I doubt the story’s true. But I’m holding onto the movie rights.