An Ant Story

The ants moved in while we were away. Isn't that how these things always start? We had just come back from a vacation on a late flight in a total downpour. We were tired and glad to be home until the cab driver dropped us off and we opened the front door to find all our smoke and fire detectors blaring.

We are not strangers to disaster striking while we're on vacation. In a previous house, our hot water heater burst while we were away and flooded the daylight basement. Of course, this was just after we had remodeled said basement so the good news was I knew what to do. I called all the contractors who had just been there and told them to come back and do it all over again.

We were nervous about what we would find but we didn't smell smoke so we went inside and looked for signs of fire. There were none so we went about turning off the alarms. We have six detectors in the house and only one can be reached with a six-foot ladder so we started there. The other five are mounted to vaulted ceilings.

We pushed the little button. Nothing. We pulled out the battery. Nothing. I went to the garage to turn off the power. Still nothing. The alarms are hard-wired. When one goes off, they all do. And, they all have battery backup power.

We didn't know what to do. We couldn't just go to sleep and worry about fixing it in the morning and we didn't have a tall enough ladder. So, we called the fire department.

They came in the middle of the night, in the heavy rain, hauled their ladder inside and one by one turned off all the alarms by unmounting each one and pulling out their batteries. When they got to our den, they found the problem. A colony of ants had moved into our attic and were trying to get into the house through one of the smoke detectors. They had clogged it up completely - it was full of giant black ants - and they had severed some connection that triggered the alarms.

It was a vast colony and once the smoke detector had been removed from its mount they poured in, literally dripping from the ceiling. Now, it's the middle of the night, it's raining, our ears were ringing, the fire department just left, and we had ants raining from above. Hundreds of them, it seemed. There was no way I was going to sleep now!

I got out the shop vac and starting sucking up ants. Hubby got out our six-foot ladder and an extender pole we use for changing light bulbs that are too high for us to reach and fashioned a cover for the hole in the ceiling out of a Ziploc bag and masking tape. But I still wasn't going to bed just across the hall.

So Hubby filled a five gallon bucket with water and positioned it under the hole for any ants that made it past his barrier. Into the water they would fall, and they would drown, he told me.

Still, I stuffed a towel under my door.

It was a disgusting mess to clean up the next day. Ants had filled the plastic bag. Some were in the bucket. But we managed, as people do when they find ants in unexpected places.

Now, we own a very long ladder and we are loyal customers of Orkin. (But we still go on vacations.)