So last night I walked into the kitchen after the kids were in bed, expecting the dishes to be done and the counters cleaned off.

(Yeah right, I have teenagers)

Anyway, I’d noticed earlier that the counter was wiped down and expected it to still be that way. But no, Clare had a pomegranate snack and left several puddles of sticky-sweet pomegranate juice and some pomegranate skin on the counter. And the ants discovered it. Not a couple big ants, no we had multitudes of microscopic light brown ants slurping up pomegranate juice.  I could almost hear their tiny ant voices extolling the virtues of pomegranate juice for their little insect hearts.

Annoyed, I grabbed a sponge and wiped up the mess, including the ants, rinsed out the sponge and ran the garbage disposal. It took a few swipes, but I was finally satisfied that the majority of ants were off the counter, at least.  Then I ran the dishwasher and walked upstairs.

Clare’s light was still on, so I stopped and told her that she should have wiped the counter off after eating the pomegranate. She told me that the pomegranate had been covered in ants and since she didn’t want to kill the ants, she filled the sink with water, submerged the pomegranate in it until the ants floated away. Then she lovingly scooped up the ants and gently placed them on the counter.  She left the puddles of pomegranate juice there so they would have something to eat after their harrowing adventure.

Oh, I told her, too bad I just wiped them up and threw them down the garbage disposal.

She called me a cold hearted ant-murderer. Oops.

To her credit, she didn’t want to waste the pomegranate, but I suggested that next time, sacrifice the fruit to save the ants by tossing the whole thing out the door. (but then we might have other visitors again)

Speaking of pomegranates, I bought 6 at Costco last week. Dean thinks I was crazy, but the kids (and apparently the ants) like them and they are supposed to be good for you. Granted, they are difficult to eat.

When I was deciding if I wanted to buy 6 pomegranates another woman was looking at them at Costco. She said that she’d eaten pomegranates every day of her life, but still was not sure how to tell if they were ripe. I think she was from a different country. For sure she wasn’t from the Midwest United States where pomegranates didn’t arrive until sometime in the early 1970’s and only then as an exotic fruit – at least in my hometown, and only at one grocery store.

I remember my first pomegranate. I was 21 and working at a “Pancake House”  located just down from Gromers – the grocery store mentioned above. Another waitress and I, and perhaps a couple of busboys went shopping one day after work and thought we’d try some of the exotic fruit. We bought a mango, a pomegranate and a quince and shared them at someone’s house, or perhaps in someone’s car. I don’t remember eating the mango, but I remember the quince was astringent and the pomegranate was juicy, full of glistening sweet red juicy seeds at the center of which was a hard, almost wooden, pit. As interesting as the pomegranate was, it was too unusual for my taste, and probably too expensive. I don’t think I had another until recently when my daughter started wanting to taste one.