My son Alex and I were standing out on our back porch, bundled up in sweatshirts, looking at my potted herb garden.
“Are you going to bring any of them in?” He asked as he pulled off a yellow leaf from my basil plant.
“Nope.” I shook my head. “I’m not making that mistake again.”
Alex looked confused. “What does that mean?”
“You don’t remember the ant problem we had one year in the kitchen, when we lived on Riverside?”
Alex shook his head. “No.”
I pointed through the dining room window at the large pathos plant sitting on a tall pedestal table in the corner of the dining room. “I put that pathos plant out on the deck for the summer when we lived on Riverside. It looked so pretty out there on the table, and it really had a growth spurt while it was outside.” I shook my head. “But when I brought it inside, when it started to get cold out at night, I began to notice little black ants all around the kitchen.”
“So what did you do?” Alex asked as he bent down to get a closer look at the parsley plant.
“First, I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from!”
Alex looked up at me. “But didn’t you just say it was because you’d brought the plant inside?”
“Yes. But I didn’t know that at first.” I sighed. “I spent weeks trying to track down where they were coming in.”
“But they weren’t coming in.”
“Exactly!” I looked over at the bird feeder where a squirrel was hanging upside down, doing pull ups to eat the birdseed. “When I finally followed an ant trail back to the planter and began to pull the plant out of the pot I realized the entire thing had turned into an ant nest!”
“What did you do?”
“What anyone would have done if they’d been me.” I looked over at him and shrugged my shoulders. “I screamed and ran to the kitchen door, opened it, and threw the entire pot outside.”
“Seriously?” Alex started to laugh.
“Yup.” I had to laugh too. “The pot broke into a dozen pieces and ants were scurrying all around the deck.”
“So what happened next?”
“I waited until most of the ants left. Then I went outside, took the plant and shook all the dirt off it’s roots, brought it back into the house, found a new planter to put it in and re-potted it.” I pointed back in the window by the dining room. “And there it is now, looking as beautiful as ever!”
Alex bent down again and looked at the mint plant. “It doesn’t look like any ants are on any of these plants.”
I shook my head again. “Nope. Not worth it. Unless…” I looked over at him. “You’d like to bring them into your room?”
Alex stood up, brushing dirt off his pants. “On the other hand, they seem fine out here.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”
Slice of Life 