So it’s war
Pretty much the first thing out of my darling wife’s mouth this morning is, “kill the bastards!” She seems to be talking both to herself and to me. The kitchen floor is strewn with triangular French ant traps. “Where do they come from?” she keeps asking me (herself?) in a tone of great vexation. These are the kind of ant that are all but invisible. In fact, if they weren’t marching boldy across the white tiles in tight columns they would be impossible to see. The kind of ant that would be perfectly delightful if covered in chocolate and dusted over a coffee ice cream cone. I can barely see them.
But Magda can see them, even when she leaves the kitchen and is out in the living room. She directs my toe, calling it in to crush individual ants she had missed in her scorched-earth policy (window cleaner). “Kill that bastard!”
This is a side of my wife I have never seen before. Sure, I know how she feels about flies, but these tiny little ants… “What if they decided to crawl into Adam’s crib?” she demands. I can’t answer this, but I enjoy picturing it. She knows this. “It’s all because there are crumbs on the floor when we go to bed,” she explains in a tone that suggests I am not doing my bit for the war effort, or that perhaps I am even some sort of ant collaborator.
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In an effort to mollify her and to leave no doubt as to where I stand in the us-vs-them scheme of things, I pick up a packet of these new “anti-flies” devices. The last few days have been warm and sunny and the bright sunshine pours right into our living room windows promising to begin attracting hordes of horrible flies any time now. ‘Ant’ in Slovene: mravla, usually (unnecessarily but cutely) diminutized to mravlica; Polish mrówka. Interestingly the v in Slovene liquidizes to a w sound, while in Polish the w is pronounced v.
Couldn’t they just arrange a trade? |
