In our house the pantry is spread throughout the actual kitchen. We have a sort of half pantry. It used to be a full pantry which, when we bought the house more than fifty years ago, held the refrigerator (which I have always called an ice box) since there wasn’t enough room in the kitchen. Almost immediately my wife began to complain, rightly, about the necessity of filling the ice trays at the kitchen sink, carrying them into the pantry and depositing them and their remaining contents, if there were any, into the ice-making compartments. We did this for several years before remodeling our kitchen.

The very first step in the remodeling was the demolition of the rear half of the pantry. This I did by sawing through the pantry walls with a hand saw, removing half of the side and the rear wall and installing a new rear wall. The removal of half of the pantry enlarged the kitchen enough to fit the refrigerator in the created space. Many other improvements were added to this project but none of the others made my wife quite as happy as this.

Our remaining half-pantry is now a closet for coats and other outerwear. It does, however, have a little space left over, which is put to gainful use for a modest portion of those things that once went in the pantry, like cans, cereal boxes, important papers, jewelry containers and small bundles of cash. (Just kidding about the jewelry and small bundles of cash.) We have managed to fill the entire space with the sundries mentioned above and, before we can add another item, we must remove at least one thing already present. This presents a major problem since there is no place in our house to put the replaced item. In the many decades that we have inhabited our house, we have managed to pack it with tons and tons of mostly unused or unneeded items, all of which we are loath to throw away. You never know when a sudden need for a previously scorned item will raise its ugly head.

While our new pantry did not have any living members of the vegetable kingdom it did have living representatives from the animal kingdom. These were mostly small creatures that, while they posed no deadly threat to the five human inhabitants of the household; they posed a definite measure of grief and annoyance to more than one of these inhabitants.

Among the first of the visiting fauna were the ants. These were seasonal visitors who seemed to prefer the early spring and whose visits continued intermittently throughout the spring and summer. My wife, normally a most tolerant family member, had no desire to live among these intruders. Not only did they infest our pantry but also they occupied our then newly remodeled kitchen as well. We purchased several items of defense that promised to send them to their demises with ease, alacrity and finality. We used these products immediately and often. They didn’t work. Spraying with noxious gasses allowed some relief but only for a day or so. Our battle with the ants continued without lasting success until, for whatever reasons, the ants decided to vacate the premises and go elsewhere for their sustenance and entertainment.

A second infiltrating army, more ominous even than the ants, were roaches. These are hideous creatures put among us to remind us that, after all, nature is still in charge and will not bend her will to ours. The sole purpose of these evil-spreaders is to carry germs and other deadly microbes to every corner of the house, its neighborhood and its neighborhood’s planet (earth), which, of course, includes our kitchen and semi-pantry. My wife tried nearly every roach-elimination device known to man, woman and child: powders, sprays, viscous fluids, magic incantations and witchcraft (only kidding about the last two items, of course.) Nothing worked. Finally, as a last effort she bought a supply of small black disks, called roach traps, which my son immediately renamed “roach brothels”. Much to our eternal delight and surprise, they worked! We watched, in reverent awe, as roaches crawled into the traps and never emerged. We rejoiced in our victory with total abandon.

But of all the gruesome creeping, scampering pests that appeared in our kitchen, the most loathed and detested were the mice. My wife, I found out, could not abide these despicable, furry little despoilers who caused her to shriek, climb upon a chair or other elevated object and throw whatever was close at hand: shoe, vase, telephone, sno-cone, furniture, ICBM (fortunately, these were rarely nearby,) anything that could serve as a projectile. This reaction she managed to implant, whether through genetics or training, into our younger daughter who continues, to this day, to carry out and improve upon her mother’s rodent-inspired procedure. It fell upon me to bait, arm and place traps just before bedtime and, in the morning in a foggy stupor, tiptoe downstairs and either disarm them or, rarely, empty them of their disgusting contents. My wife refused to be in a kitchen that contained either mice, dead or alive, or armed traps. Usually, after a long, painful period of time we would be rid of them and could declare joyful victory.

The irony of these loathsome visitations was that our house was, and is, impeccably clean. My wife is compulsive in her efforts to leave our home not just dirt-free but also germ-free and aseptic. We concluded that the intruders were brought in by ill-wishing visitors, migrated from neighboring houses or had a perverse taste for strong soaps, detergents and disinfectants. Whatever their origin, they were never deeply appreciated by those who occupied the home