Ants in my pants

Quite literally today, the ants crawled up my pants, as I am visiting
one of the elderly missionaries on the station who's been a bit ill and
wondering how I can suavely smush the ants beneath my scrubs without
seeming like a strung-out meth addict. The fecundity of African bugs
requires a second sense to avoid breathing them, bathing with them, or
drinking them in your water. The bugs range from the beautiful --
moths, preying mantises -- to the large -- some crazy jumping
rhino-looking beetle and of course the palmetto bugs, near and dear to
the heart of anyone who's lived in Houston -- to the organized --
termites, army ants. I'm reminded of Pilgrim on Tinker Creek, when
Dillard describes the water bug eating the frog, and the sheer volume of
life that the bugs represent. The amount of alteration that the
termites put on the landscape is a testament to their numbers and their
impact.
Occasionally you will get a stream of ants migrating from one place to
another, and the only recourse is to get out of the way. Apparently you
can control the flow with ashes, a practice which reminds me of building
dams in the street gutters when I was a kid. And it leads to
fascinating voodoo-like rituals of ash circles around your bed and
doorsills to try to keep them out. I sprayed my doorway to get rid of
the regular ants (this practice is strongly discouraged with the
migrating ants, as it tends to send them into a swarming frenzy) and was
pleased to have a little pile of dead ants in front of my door for at
least 2 weeks. Apparently the Raid here is a big stronger than the US
-- probably DDT or something. I have fortunately been free of the
marching version of the ants in my house to date, and have lived in
harmony with the bugs, although something has recently broken the truce
(did they hear about the ant pile-up in front of the door?) and is
giving me bites on my arms and legs that appear when I wake up. Today I
had to share my dining room chair with a praying mantis who had perched
on top of it and was reluctant to move. I am starting to feel more
sympathy for those homeless folks I used to see in the ER in Denver with
their 'bug problems'....