THEmy face to face with them – I don’t want to use war metaphors, let’s say my game with them – start with spring, when I reopen the holiday home and control if they managed to break through my barriers.
If the dissuasor disks worked well (I do not use pesticides, by environmentalism and loyalty), if the white powder strips along the thresholds have made their duty, if not known suspicions in the usual corners, we are only at the beginning. With the summer, the first can be made, shyly in exploration.
Here the ants are small, brownish, modest cabotage. But appearances do not deceive: They are tireless explorers, capable of identifying the peruge between the windows, flaw in the shutterssagging in older gaskets. I begin to believe they are now able to erode, file, to undermine, with their tiny ganasce, any material.
Danda Santini, director of “Io Donna” (photo by Carlo Vangeri Gilbert).
The truth is that they are very tenacious manufacturers of security deposits. Small sands of sand, apparently harmless, as forgotten over time by a careless housewife, who hide their treasures and where they move agile in microscopic tunnels without anything to collapse.
There they stify, in unison, coordinated with an enviable spirit of solidarity, the supplies for the winter. By communicating with each other plans and strategies, geolocation and refueling bags, with short notes, well aligned in tidy files, on the left who wears, on the right who falls within.
Will they notify that I arrived, the huge black spot that brings dismay and alarm, creates disorder and rejects, the threat of total destruction and mercilessly? OR Who knows if they understood that I don’t want to exterminate, but just contain? That I cannot leave the green light in the house, but on the terrace my tolerance is great, loving even.
The perennial struggle against ants (illustration of Cinzia Zenocchini).
There they can make stocks of food remainsa clapboard falling by mistake, a few crumbs of focaccia or cake, the core of a juicy fishing. I leave them there, for them. I observe their maneuvers without disturbing. Care that they will not tire. Honestly admired.
They make ants, they work hard, with their heads down, even when the others – the cicadas – if they amaze it. Ants basically all of us, who we run for the guarantee of safe winters. That we start again every day, from where we had left or reconstruct what did not work.
That every morning we swear houses that now in the evening will already be to be rearrangedwe start washing machines of clothes intended to venerate again, we mechanically rearrange objects that will return out of place. That at the end of August we return to the ranks, obedient, in ranks, again bends on our laborsthe gestures to be repeated, the accounts to return, the orders to escape, the pages to be filled, lessons to prepare.
And the peace agents who in this median period, elaborate, discuss and make truck plans and treated That the words and gestures out of control of the great predators destroy in a flash by precipitating in the dark. And it’s up to start again, head down and obstinacy, without complaints, without sagging. All dacchia.