Talking ants and a big, honking lot of pasta salad

This is what started it. Look closely at the picture above. Between the faux bricks are two ants. Do they look like they are talking to each other? They did to my father.

Saturday night The Wife and I are sitting at my parent’s kitchen table. My mother is making a pasta salad (to which I will return later in this post) when my dad begins pointing to the wall above the stove in the kitchen.

“Look, you can see them coming out from a hole in the wall, probably from the basement, behind this cabinet here and now they’re crawling across here…

over here….

to here…

into this cabinet…

…and then out of the cabinet, where…

…and LOOK, LOOK, now one’s stopping to talk to another.”

All the time, he is pointing with his left index finger to make sure we also are following the story.

Now so far, I have been careful to keep my parents pretty much out of my blogs, not because of any respect for authority or any of that, but because I didn’t want to hear, “Oh, B___, that’s not what happened.” Or as my mom would say Saturday night, “Oh, B____, I don’t want people knowing we have ANTS.” As if nobody else in the free world has ever had ants in their kitchen!

But this — my dad pointing to the wall where the ants were talking to each other — I, as any responsible blogger would do, couldn’t resist getting out the camera and taking a photo. While I missed his actual pointing, I did get a photo of two ants talking to each other.

And I did get a photo of him later getting ready to set a trap for the ants.

Lest my mother be left out, my mother, as I mentioned, is making pasta salad, but not just a little pasta salad, but as usual, a big, honking (it’s a technical term like “heap”) lot of pasta salad.

She starts making the pasta salad…

(aside: for some reason, this story reminds me of the story Thomas-Builds-The-Fire tells about Arlene Joseph in the movie Smoke Signals for some reason: “My mom makes the best pasta salad. Pasta salad that walks across the water. Pasta salad rising from the dead…a good pasta salad turns any meal into a feast”)

…and then she realizes she doesn’t have a big enough bowl for her pasta salad, so she has to put into two bowls, in this case, pots she uses as bowls.

Mom: “I need a bigger bowl.”

Dad (to us): “She says that every time. If she had a bigger bowl, she’d need an even bigger bowl.”

Mom: “Oh, R___. I would not.”

At this point, The Wife says something to the effect that an uncle and aunt of mine are apt to say: “Tell the truth and let the Lord bless you.”

Because The Wife knows that it’s true. My mother always makes a big, honking lot of pasta salad.

But as she often says: “It’s better than not enough.”

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