This spring was so dry, the paper predicted we'd have a bug-free time of it. And then, of course, it rained....

There is a blessed week or two, after green emerges, when the insect life consists mostly of bitty harmless gnats that swarm and sometimes get up your nose, but do nothing worse then that. And then comes full spring/ early summer, and we're into the bloodsucking #$%#s that make the True North Strong and Free a place where you wear DEET or want to die.

There's biting bugs and biting bugs. Black flies don't bother me much, but I have a peculiar, deep-rooted hatred and horror of the big biting deerflies and horseflies. They don't go for blood; they like flesh. They take chunks out of your arms and shoulders and legs and (preferentially) your scalp. And they are persistent buggers, trailing you around for what seems like forever.

But the dominant insect, if you aren't in the woods or on water, is the dear old 'skeeter. A fascinating sort of creature, really. The female goes for blood because she needs your particular protein to lay batch after batch of eggs--10 clutches of roughly 200 eggs in her lifetime, a lot of protein for a wispy little body to put together. The further north you get, the shorter the potential egg-laying period is, the faster the ladies have to suck up that hemoglobin, and the more intense and competitive the mosquito gets. In the Far North, as David Quammen puts it, mosquitos "emerge in savage sky-darkening swarms like nothing seen even in the Amazon ... an unprotected human could be bitten 9,000 times per minute. At that rate, a large man would lose half his total blood in two hours. Arctic hares and reindeer move to higher ground or die." (Natural Acts, "Sympathy for the Devil").

It's not like that around here, but it still gets awfully buggy, especially in an old house like this where the screens (the old-fashioned type that you put up in spring and replace with heavy storm windows in fall) are not of the tightest, where children have been known to poke holes in screening, where doors don't fit perfectly, and where three cats are forever dancing the in-and-out fandango. I sit at the kitchen table in the evening alternately reading and slapping. We all wake up each morning scratching.

The bites really aren't so bad. (Malaria, yellow fever, and dengue are not endemic to Canada, thank God.) You get desensitized over time, and they hardly itch at all. It's the sound of the little demons that drives a person batty. In the small hours of the night, when everything's quiet, or when you're lying peaceably in the bath with a mystery novel, you hear that small, insistent, utterly unmistakable whine: mosquito in the room, And you can go just about crazy trying to catch and kill the bug before it bites you.

It did occur to me, this morning as I lay there and listened to the whining, how much this reminds me of anxiety and obsession. Not great gut-wrenching Big Legitimate Worry, or horrible panic attacks, nor true cold-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach fear, but the sort of fretting that tends to overtake us all, often because we've done something we shouldn't have done, or forgot to do something we should have done, and we're worrying about the consequences. Or, even more likely, because we feel the need to control the way life is going (or people, or God, or whatever), and we're not sure it's going to turn out the way we wanted to. Or, exceedingly often, because something has put us in a snit.

But one way or another, we've got our knickers in a wholly disproportionate twist. We can lie there early in the morning, stewing in our own juices, anxiety whining, utterly preoccupied with the undesirable whatever-it-is. It's very easy to take something quite small--a slight, a worry, a chance remark, a twinge of guilt, a deserved rebuke, a tiny outrage or injustice--and focus so strongly on it that it dominates our landscape completely, the way the whine of a mosquito totally takes over a person's consciousness at 3 in the morning. But that's elevating something small to god-status. And a grievance or self-criticism makes a truly lousy god.

Is the thing really a mosquito at all? Or are we reading something into it from our own reactivity and negativity? I can choose to interpret a remark as a put-down when there's no such intention behind it. I can choose to see a friend's not waving at me from across a crowed room as The Cut Direct, and obsess about it practically forever, when in fact the friend just didn't see me at all. I can set up some totally absurd standard of service and be furious when a salesclerk fails to meet my expectations. I can feel that others should be infinitely sensitive to my needs and then be outraged when they fail to comply. I can be paranoid about mosquitos, hearing them everywhere, any time. Or I can say, "Oh. You again." and maybe slap the thing if it lands on me, or maybe tolerate it, because the bite really isn't that bad and I have more interesting things to focus on.

For myself, as I get older, I begin to believe that a reasonably thick skin, mild myopia, and a not-too-finely-tuned ear are great gifts, ones that a person should cultivate. Sensitive is as sensitive does, not as sensitive feels. In this, it helps to be involved and engaged with life; it doesn't leave you much time or energy to fret much about mosquitoes.

Of course, sometimes a person can't help being reactive. Certainly I have my own hot buttons, and the slightest touch on them can make me as reactive as a cat on a hot stove. But my hot buttons are my hot buttons--my problem, not the other person's, and my job is to contain my reaction as best I can, get over it, and see if I can figure out what the problem is. I can't expect others to tippy-toe around me indefinitely, after all.

Above all, I have to try to remember to keep things in perspective. That whine in the ear at 3 a.m. may be maddening, but it is very small in the great scheme of things. A mosquito bite is no big deal. I have lots of blood; I can afford to lose a little. And the bites only itch for a short wh ile--less, if you put baking soda on them.

As for the whine: ignore it. Listen to Mozart or B.B. King in your head. Think of God or Kosovo, grand and terrible and glorious things, or plan to go dancing, or to take apart an outboard engine, or to redecorate the kitchen. But remember after all, that the mosquito is very small in the great scheme of things. You're a whole lot bigger than she is.