This summer, on the weekends, we will begin posting personal reflections written by local writers. This article will be the first in an ongoing series.
Cell phone? Check. Boat keys? Check. Good attitudes? Check.
Alice and I were preparing for our weekend at the cabin. What else are you going to do when the sun is shining mercilessly, I mean beckoningly, and the 11-year-old looks up at you with those big adoring eyes, body vibrating with barely contained energy? Heat warnings be damned, let’s go to the lake!
I dusted off the boat license I had been brave enough to secure only just last year and had only used once. I packed salads and blueberries and crackers and hummus and granola and… Pringles and Sourpatch Kids, naturally.
After using up half a tank of gas and the weekend’s supply of chips and candy, we arrived happy and ready to relax. My growing girl dutifully helped me truck everything to the boat in one trip, the short boat ride went off without a hitch, and we had safely seconded ourselves, slippery with sunscreen, to the deck chairs on the dock. At the water’s edge, we could roll ourselves into the lake the moment the heat became unbearable. Which it did. Almost immediately.
After spending the whole first day in the hot, hot sun, we set the cabin’s air conditioning to just above freezing and treated ourselves to a movie night inside, because these are the things Manitobans have to do after surviving long harsh winters complaining about the cold and being stuck indoors all the time.
The next morning, we set the cycle on repeat. Sunscreen, swim, sit. Sunscreen, swim, sit. Sunscreen, swim, sit.
The sun began to set and I was the fun mom for once. I did not police the snack cupboard, nor enforce bedtime. Instead we squinted hard at our chapter books, both forgetting and unwilling to get up and turn on our reading lamps. Dusk is a dreamy time of day.
After tucking our tired and temperature-whiplashed bodies into bed that second night, we wondered what two strong, independent women like ourselves could not handle in this life.
Mother Nature answered that question for us: mosquitoes.
Skeetos, skeeters, mozzies, migs, midges, nippers, beelzebugs.
No, the hardship wasn’t the thunderstorm to end all thunderstorms at 11:00 p.m. that woke the tweenager who needed comforting like she still did on stormy nights. And it wasn’t the power that went off which killed the air conditioning either, though it did remind us ladies of luxury why heat, humidity, and hell all start with the same letter of the alphabet.
It was the brigade of thousands of the world’s tiniest vampire violinists playing their blood-sucking serenade outside every one of the freshly opened windows.
Vampito. Mosquite-no. And why Miss-squitoe and not Mister-squitoe, for that matter? It is 2023, after all.
In the wake of the storm’s passing, the absence of the air conditioning was palpable. The calm air now reverberated with the symphonic hum of the perplexing parasite. Dozens of them—the smartest ones, I’m sure—somehow performed a scientific marvel and phased straight through the window frames’ crosshatch barriers while the weaker ones were left pinging themselves against the screens.
Ping. Hum. Ping. Hum. Ping, ping, hummmm.
They phased and flung and performed with such exceptional flare that I admit I took some pride in the indomitable spirit of Manitoba’s unofficial provincial bird.
Gallinippers, gabbernappers, grannynippers… cousins. Why are mosquitoes called cousins? Someone once told me it’s because “there are so many, they stick so close, they stay so long.” As a member of the Mennonite culture, where there are a lot of cousins, I’m sure this is only and entirely a term of endearment.
Other cultural, geographical terms of endearment include, the Paul Bunyan mosquito (used in the Minnesota/Michigan area), the Jersey mosquito, the Texas mosquito—all because of their attitude or size. Maybe there are big, scary mosquitoes in other parts of the world, but in Manitoba we call them pterodactyls for a reason and there’s a reason we joke about getting carried away by mosquitoes in the middle of the night. Gives a whole new meaning to the term “swat team.”
When the bug bites outnumbered the times we’d gotten up to check every inch of every screen on every window, wondering how in the world they were still getting in, Alice had an idea.
“Mom,” said the dear girl, who I could tell was trying her best to keep it together.
“Yes,” said her dear mother, whom she could tell was trying her best to keep it together.
“Can we sleep in the guest cottage?”
She was right. Our securities had been breached. We were taking enemy fire. It would wound only our pride to make a retreat. So we abandoned our besieged and now-sweltering fortress to the refuge of the sweltering but as yet uncompromised guest cottage.
And from our more defensible position—the hastily thrown-open futon in front of the hastily thrown-open windows—we held our breath (mosquitoes can smell carbon dioxide, you know) and waited for our morale to recover.
The barest hint of a breeze helped to ease our tension. We could see the black outlines of the scraggly jack pines sway ever so slightly against the midnight sky. Except it wasn’t midnight… it was almost 2:30 a.m.
“Have you ever in your life been up this late?” I asked Alice softly.
“No,” she whispered.
We played word association games to distract and relax ourselves. I asked her questions about school and friends and to tell me anything else on her mind she may have been thinking of telling me but hadn’t found the right time yet.
In return, I let her ask me any question she could possibly think up and I answered them tenderly and honestly in return.
At one point, Alice, with some urgency, asked me to look outside and tell her what all those little green “sparks” flying all around our yard were. She had never seen fireflies before. How is it that one bug can elicit excruciating discomfort and another such calming delight? The firefly’s ethereal, bioluminescent effect is literally named after the devil, luciferase, Latin for Lucifer, the “light bearer.”
We sort of fell asleep, I think. I’m not sure. But it was nice.
Until it wasn’t.
Something bit someone. The actual spawn of Satan had returned.
A bajillion bug bites and an entire bottle of calamine lotion later, the sunrise began to flirt with the horizon and it was official: we had itchsomnia.
“Mom,” said my darling Alice, who I could tell was trying her best to keep it together.
“Yes,” said her dear mother, whom she could tell was trying her best to keep it together.
“Can we go home?”
And we did. We packed up so fast, I didn’t have time to be impressed with the calm and assertive young woman I’d brought with me, who joined forces with me the moment she was asked, who problem-solved and kept hope and shared secrets with me in the middle of the night. She told me her deepest fear… mosquitoes, it turns out.
It was barely 6:00 a.m. before I was listening to Alice snore softly in the car beside me, her stuffed bunny tucked unscathed under her arm. I recalled other sleepless nights spent with this daughter of mine. I know they were hard, but as time would have it, I only thought of them with fondness.
I hope the same will happen for her, I thought. I hope she will remember more about this weekend than the mosquitoes when she thinks back on the time we spent together… I hope she will remember the fireflies.
