There are ants in the kitchen, but this does not bother Marco. We are somewhat out in the hills, here, embedded in vineyards and low golden fields and patches of tree and bush that are neither of these things. The kitchen itself is half out of the house. It spills from the southern edge of the house through large doors that are often wide open in warm weather, onto an ancient patio and then on into the rows of vegetables and herbs. The ants march merry into the kitchen, sometimes lulled by the dish of honey we put out by the door, sometimes bolder.

Marco does not store food in the kitchen, of course. In the cooler part of the house under a staircase is a thick-walled room that is sided with shelf after shelf of neatly stacked plastic pickle buckets and a refrigerator in the back. I do not know how he got the buckets. He stores food in these, in that room. It is a measure of his humor that he has taken to labeling the buckets in Korean. He does not speak, read, or write Korean, and the contents of the buckets often change. If at one point the labels were accurate, he does not say. He has always had a good memory, and is rarely confused for more than a handful of days after the basmati is gone and has been replaced with jasmine. The rest of us more often than not remove lids.

We bring to the kitchen what we need for meals and we suffer the ants as they suffer us, eating under a tired sun on the long, thick wood of the patio table. Marco on various occasions has made it quite clear to the ants that the kitchen is as far as they are welcome in his home, and they seem to have decided to abide. For the most part, they eat what we discard into the small pile by the door on a battered and plain copper place; we discard little, but it must be feast upon feast for them. After a time we bring what is left to the compost, and clean the kitchen for the evening.

Sometimes when I am sent to pantry to fetch some more flour, when I am alone in the cool quiet of that room with the one thin window that does not open, high on the wall, I pop the lid on the large bucket of wheat and plunge my arms in to the elbows, the cool flour, filling the room with the smells of summer and sun.