May 16, 2006

• The subject is still mosquitoes.

  I thought I was beginning yesterday to get over the latest fatigue
  overload.  I took it easy most of the day.  The only eventful
  part was orange tabby Nemo having her first kitten.  She was
  restless and uneasy, and kept trying to get into the cabinet under the
  sink.  I suppose from her perspective it would have made a safe
  den for her litter, but neither Doug nor I liked that idea. 

  She finally dropped the kitten on a towel we laid down in the corner
  between that cabinet and the kitchen stove, then let us move her and
  the baby into a box in a dark sheltered area under some shelves in the
  living room.  So far, there’s just the one kitten, orange like its
  mother.  We were pretty sure she would be a good mother from the
  way she baby-sat with Hilary’s litters.  She leaves the box to
  eat, drink and use the litter box, and when the kitten cries she
  hurries back.

  I crawled into bed with a book to read about ten last night. 
  That’s when the strenuous activity began.  It was the nightly
  ritual of mosquito whapping.  As darkness descends, they buzz
  around the reading lamp in that corner, and dive-bomb me. 
  Occasionally one will get into position to be clapped inside the
  book.  Each time I notice a half dozen or more of them clinging to
  the ceiling, I stand up on the bed and whap them with my book. 
  Paperbacks work best for that, and I try to avoid reading hard bound
  books this time of year.

  After about the third or fourth leap up to whap, I got out of bed and
  went into the kitchen for a “sticky strip,” the transparent window bug
  catchers that have become the high-tech replacements for old-fashioned
  flypaper.  I stuck it on the inner surface of my lampshade. 
  I reached up in there several times to shoo the skeeters that had lit
  on other portions of the shade toward the tanglefoot.  One of
  those times, a faux pas unplugged the circline energy-saver fluorescent
  tube in the lamp, and I had to go find a flashlight to get the plug
  reinserted.  Need I say that I was more fatigued when I woke this
  morning than when I first crawled into bed to read last night?

  Before I finally turned out the light to go to sleep, the tanglefoot
  had trapped half a dozen mosquitoes, and I had whapped, clapped and
  slapped maybe fifty or so.  Nature is relatively kind this time of
  year.  This first hatch of the season is always the ones we call
  “bombers,” big and slow.  It allows an easy transition from the
  winter mode when a tickle on exposed skin warrants no more than to
  brush back a stray lock of hair or scratch the itch, into summer mode
  when every tickle is a potential bloodsucker and must be greeted with a
  slap.  When the nasty little hardbodies with the potent sting
  hatch, it’s not just a slap, but a slap-press-roll motion.  If you
  just slap them, they shake themselves off, blow you a raspberry, and
  fly away fast.

  As nature is kind to us, so are we kind to her.  I have used no insecticides since I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring about forty years ago.  In a comment to yesterday’s entry, bodiddly
  pointed out that having mosquitoes means our environment hasn’t been
  poisoned.  That’s one of the reasons I love living here A couple
  of years ago, when a neighbor sprayed his yard, the overspray on the
  breeze made me ill.  Multiple chemical sensitivities is part of
  this immune syndrome I have.  I have more reason to be thankful
  for my sensitivities than to regret them..  Whenever the state or
  the railroad proposes spraying herbicides or
  insecticides, many of us protest.  Sometimes our protests have
  succeeded.

  

  • 3:54 pm
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