Another story involving the creepy-crawlies.

If you live in The South, you’ll probably see where this story is going before I even start telling it. If you don’t, this is why you’re glad you don’t live in The South.

My parents stopped by on Saturday morning to pick up the remainder of the stuff that they deposited at our house when they first came down to Austin about a month ago. At this point, what was left consisted mostly of my mother’s houseplants that I had somehow managed not to kill (they’re significantly less demanding than my gay basil plant, who begs my attention rather loudly when he starts to droop and drop his leaves … what a drama queen!).

Mom also wanted a couple of the offspring from the yucca plants in the front yard, which I was only too happy to give her. They spring out to the side and have been known to burrow under the border of the flowerbed into the lawn itself, so any excuse to dig them up is fine with me. One of them was actually growing through the bricks in the border itself, so I picked up my trusty trowel and plopped down on the ground where I pulled out the brick above and began to hack away at the plant to free the shoot.

And then I felt the shooting pains on my ankle.

Southern gardeners know that this story is going one of two ways: either I pulled up the plant to reveal that it had rooted in a fire ant mound, or I had managed to put my foot right on top of the mound while I was working on the plant. In this case, it turned out to be the latter, and the little buggers cascaded over the top of my sandals onto my ankle and were working their way up the inside of my leg, biting me the whole way.

And thus did I do the traditional dance of the Southern gardener: the “get them off of me one-step,” which looks suspiciously like hopping up and down on one foot, swatting at one’s self in the hopes of stopping the ants’ progress before they get Up There and start biting away at sensitive portions of the male anatomy. This dance is often accompanied by the removal of clothing, although fortunately this time I was wearing shorts — I have been known to drop my jeans when this happens in the backyard.

A shower and bottle of calamine lotion later, and I still look like I’ve come down with some horrible communicative disease, but at least the bites don’t itch … much.

Scratch. Scratch.

Tags: fire-ants, gardening