Normally, during the latter half of March, there’s an unseasonably warm and bright, sunny day. How easily it draws one from their winter’s interior domain. What a glorious morning on this year’s such day, so opportune for a moment’s peace and pensivity.
I trudge through the back yard’s deep, spongy turf to the once rustic, now ramshackle shed. At least it’s seaworthy, as I find it afloat in the effluence of the cardiac-like sump pump’s regular regurgitations. With a reverse vape, I inhale a waft of the warm air’s fogginess, while yanking a quick-flip lawn-chair from the proliferation of patio paraphernalia, intertwined in a tangle of green and grey garden hoses.
The ritual, that’s about to ensue momentarily, has been played out now for as long as I can remember.
I spot a mosquito sputtering sporadically overhead, like Snoopy struggling with his Sopwith Camel, ahead of an encounter with the Red Baron. There are some fits and starts amidst a wavering range of elevations, followed by a sharper drop that signals the attack.
I like these guys, for they’re admirably combative, cagey, and elusive. That said, I’ll swat them maliciously, while cursing them unmercifully, when engulfed in a summer’s swarm, but, not on this day.
You see, I’ve forever given the first mosquito of the season a free pass for a free fill. Never has such ceremony failed to lift my spirits. It may be their fleetingly, fledgling lives, that span all of 10-to-20 days for males, about twice that for females; figures that do not factor in any data as per their demise to that “Splat.” The fine-print of my offer allows for its withdrawal when north of Highway 60, where these stingers’ hardware is much less medical-grade, and more like an ice auger.
The females, busy with birthing by the billion, rarely bother anyone. I suppose their free time’s a bit limited. As such, the males gallantly handle the bulk of the parenting.
This is quite obvious in the machinations and manoeuvres of any mosquito prepping for injection, exactly like some finicky golfer setting up to drive the ball off a tee. Moreover, that cool, whirring hmm-buzz, is so clearly a Dad-thing.
My wife has difficulty with this seasonal ritual, often disrupting it with a disparaging diatribe heavily laden with lethalities. In fairness, the transmission of pathogens like malaria, West Nile, and, Zika, is sort of ominous sounding. Additionally, I have some vague recollection of malaria, from Grade 4 social studies, felling a few folks from Europe, inexplicably intent on mapping Africa’s interior; go figure?
Then again, that might’ve been scurvy. Still, the perennial pattern of these proceedings has taken on some intermittence, owing, perhaps, to that recent pandemic; of which, Missus-E maintains I may be complicit.
Either way, I muss my hair some, and feign some shortness of breath, dispatching her forthwith to the furthest Fortino’s for some organic OJ, just in case.
Maybe this ill-ease is due to that movie with Dustin Hoffman and his Ebola-infected monkeys, or, … were they Darwins? I’m still scratching my head (not under my arm) trying to get my mind around that “we-came-from-apes thing,' fairly certain that we still have apes.
When lost so, wandering in such wonders, the Book of Ecclesiastes often beckons, for following one’s first forage, its tantalizing tease, from one’s innermost places, never fully fades.
As sensational as mankind’s scientific advances are – geological determinations of the earth’s duration, its dinosaurs, and, even elements of evolution, let alone that matter of the interplanetary motion of celestial bodies, and, within it, Copernicus’ clarification of that contentious issue as per who orbits whom – they’ve neither eased mankind’s angst over the meaning of life, nor quieted Ecclesiastes’ echo.
My mosquito mate struggles to extract his stinger, then, I faintly discern from my eye an appreciative glance from his pinpoint pair. I wonder more of the intelligent design of this remarkable organ, and the incomprehensible operational interaction between it and the brain, that baffles scientists still.
The mosquito’s flight path is more of a bob and a weave, mixed with a little ebb, but not much flow, due to his bloated, red belly’s ballast – think Lightfoot’s “a load of iron-ore 26,000 thousand tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,” … times five!
As he drifts away, I’m sad to see him go. Then, the image that forever follows, is that of some First World War-era plane, always piloted by Roberto Clemente, in his No, 21, Pittsburgh Pirates white, with black and yellow trim. Unfortunately, it’s dangerously overloaded with relief supplies for earthquake-stricken Nicaragua. It labours on as precariously as my mosquito, but, then crashes into the Caribbean Sea, just ahead of 1973’s New Year’s Day.
The parallel of all this to Frederick Forsythe’s The Shepherd, about a pilot, flying home to England on Christmas Eve, 1957, that gets lost in the fog over the North Sea, while low on fuel, is uncanny. Destined for tragedy, he encounters a De Havilland Mosquito fighter-plane, that shepherds him onwards to …
I consider the precariousness of our own fledgling existences, as well, along with Sir Thomas Aquinas’ "A little philosophy inclineth one to atheism, a little more, to religion.”
And, Ecclesiastes again, “all the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full.” This latter item brings to mind the many worthy ports of call along the way, with random encounters with pastors and paupers, even some pests from the past, and palliative patients, that prop any sad day’s soul.
Finally, may Ecclesiastes 3:4, “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,” inspire one to that place where courage conquers confusion and concern, where life is to be lived, and those lives that have been lived, are to be celebrated.
Upon further reflection, I like to think that my mosquito is the same guy each season, for as per Aquinas, perhaps such encounters are not per chance after all … Happy Easter.
John Epstein is a former, 25-year Orillia business owner who left southern Ontario for the north years ago, and has never been back. He is now a freelance writer, whose column will appear monthly in OrilliaMatters. He can be reached at [email protected]