The Lady And The Fire Ants

In our family, we worry about fire ants.

This is an odd preoccupation for New England youth, but we have witnesses from the netherworld of Texas, who have born witness to the horrors of life among these predators.  Cousin Xenia is an especially compelling witness, for she spent most of her early-to-middle childhood in Texas, and she herself once stepped on a colony of fire ants, as a small child, and was quickly reduced to  cries of agony.

Madeleine is always on the lookout for fire ants, and nobody in our family was pleased to hear that Xenia had experienced them first-hand, back in Texas.  Daniel noted that Xenia's brother James has just moved back to Texas, with his lovely newlywed bride, Karen, and he saw the pro's and con's of this situation in a balanced way that might elude a less nuanced intellect; Karen in the "good" column; fire ants in the "bad" column.  And he summed up James's predicament as follows, in light of his residence in a fire-ant-infested state:

"Well, James is not  lucky - except that he married a good woman."

(Spring, 2013)