On the dog days

it might even be too hot for the insects

“Do you think they are too hot and they are coming inside?” I say to my spouse Janyce who is crouching on the floor with a tissue in her hand sweeping up yet another black ant.

“I don’t think so, but I can’t tell where they are coming from,” she says.

I’m walking around the house with her scrutinizing our wood floor. The finish has little elongated black knots in the wood and everything looks like an ant to me. Janyce has her headlamp on, shining the light down in corners, and running her hand along the baseboards.

“The troubling thing is that we keep finding them in all these various areas of the house, not just in one place,” she says. “Damn it. Here’s another one. This is war.”

I climb onto the bed next to our dog who is spread out directly under the ceiling fan. We’ve had the central air conditioning on for days but it’s still too hot for her. I wipe off a clump of dog fur that is sticking to my workout leggings. Everything feels dusty and fur laden and I can hear the fan from the outside unit kick on again.

I read that The Farmer's Almanac lists the “dog days of summer,” as the period of July 3 through August 11. This year truly lives up to the idiom. I’m hot. And I can’t get myself to start on the long to-do list we started talking about over the scrambled eggs and black bean burrito I made for us an hour ago. We’ve got a vacation coming up in a matter of days, a long-planned family outing on a lake in Vermont, and there is much to do to get ready—including figuring out where the black ants are coming from. While Janyce is running around the house reporting on ant discovery from the other rooms, I keep pulling up the 10-day weather forecast on another tab for the town we’ll be staying in pretty close to the Canadian border. It’s looking like 80-degree days and a lot cooler at night. I’ll take it.

This is all to say that I won’t be publishing another post until Saturday, August 13. Wishing you all a cool summer break!