Mosquitoes
I wonder how they got on board,
This swarming, biting, pesky hoarde?
Didn’t Noah see them coming
Or hear their loud, annoying humming?
They survived a world that flooded
To torment all who are warm-blooded.
–Blanche
I don’t think I’ve ever seen mosquitoes as bad as they are this summer. The city sprays but they seem to flourish on insecticides. I believe that the Lord built a system of checks and balances into nature and one of the things that keeps mosquitoes in check is natures’s amazing helicopter, the dragonfly. Mosquitoes sometimes thrive in Minnesota where my brother and sister-in-law live but this year, they’ve not seen many at all. They did, however, have an abundance of dragonflies. Birds and bats help keep the whiny blood-suckers down but we seem to have fewer mosquito predators and more of their prey. Not only are they annoying, they hurt, cause itchy bumps and carry a disease or two or more including the West Nile Virus. Mosquitoes are bad news!
On a much more positive note, yesterday my co-author Barbara Burgess and I were featured on a blog site, http://welcometopoppycove.wordpress.com/. This is a beautiful, colorful site of two writers, Andrea Taylor and Heather Shkuratoff. They write as co-authors under the name Barbara Jean Coast. Their first cozy mystery, Strangled by Silk, was published by Cozy Cat Press. Thanks, Barbara Jean for the interview.
If you haven’t read a cozy mystery yet, come give us a try. There are many cozies that furnish happy hours of reading. And I’ve yet to find a community of writers any more supportive than these.
I don’t “hate” many things, but mosquitoes are sure one of those things. Unfortunately,
they seem to really, really like me, causing severely itching red bumps that take a couple of weeks to go away.