First mosquito evenings of the new summer

There is a particular evening in late May, a warm, still one, when the first mosquito arrives and the whole balance of the season shifts at once. It is never noticed arriving. One sits outside after dinner, comfortable, enjoying the long dusk, and then there is a high, thin note that is unmistakable and unwelcome, and the evening is no longer quite the same. The city has not officially announced the start of mosquito season. The insects have simply decided, and one learns to listen for them.

The first of them is always alone, and somehow that makes it worse. A single mosquito is a problem that has to be solved, individually and immediately, rather than accepted as the ambient cost of being outdoors. One glances at the bare arm, swats at the neck, goes inside to check the lights. A cloud of them, later in the summer, is easier: it is weather, it is everywhere, one puts on repellent and makes peace with it. The first mosquito of the year is a personal affront, and the householder is out of practice at dealing with it.

What is curious is how much of the summer routine is secretly organized around this one insect. The standing water in the tray under the plant gets emptied that first week. The window screens are checked for holes that no one noticed through the whole dry winter. The evening chair on the balcony, so pleasant in April, is reconsidered; one buys a small fan, on the sound biological principle that a breeze the size of a desk fan is more than a mosquito can navigate. Whole habits of domestic life rearrange themselves around an animal that weighs almost nothing. People do this every year and treat it as a surprise each time.

There is also a peculiar, ancient intimacy to it. The mosquito is one of the very few wild animals left that treats a human body as a habitat, and it does so without asking. In a city of managed parks and exterminated vermin, it is the small untamed thing that still shows up at the dinner table, takes what it wants, and leaves a small itchy evidence behind. The relationship is not complicated: it wants a blood meal, and the human wants to finish the cold drink in peace. There is nothing personal in it, and yet the swat is personal, because the annoyance is.

The truce, when it comes, is the point of the exercise. By July, the mosquitoes are a known feature of the evenings, the same as the heat and the cicadas, and one goes out with repellent on and a certain resignation. The first evenings of June, though, have a quality the later months lose. They are the last nights of the year when the mosquito problem is still, technically, just one mosquito, and the summer still feels new and generous, before it hardens into the long insect season it becomes.

By the time the numbers build up, the city has long since stopped noticing the sound. The screen doors are closed, the repellent is by the door, and the high thin note is, once more, just part of the warm evening. Summer has arrived for real, and with it, the small war that runs, unnoticed, from the first dusk of June to the last of September.