Skitter Country

I live in Skitter Country, better known as Southern Ontario. You may have heard of it: land of the lakes, home of the froggy pond, mother of the marshy swamps, bogs, and sump pumps hiccuping their watery gullets into deep dank ditches. There’s a lot of water. It’s also very green and me and the mosquitoes are loving it.

So are the birds. When I wake up in the morning there’s an orchestra outside my window of tweeters and tootlers and some pretty horrendous caws coming from the local crows. This morning, they were so obnoxious they almost sounded like the hadidas in South Africa.

If you don’t know what those sound like, check them out here. *link* Quite something from the fine feathered pterodactyls flying around in our world. Anyway the songbirds in Ontario are loving the mosquito feast this year. They’re not yet worrying the berries and apples slowly sprouting on the flowering shrubs. They’ll leave those until the fall.

When I was a kid and a teenager and a young adult and a middle-aged adult, heck my whole life before now, I didn’t weather mosquito season well. My arms and legs would be covered in welts: itchy, and then broken-open, and then scabby. Shudder, I didn’t do well during Skitter season.

Now, something amazing has happened. I went out to cut some peonies for a bouquet this morning and when I was coming back into the house, there was one solitary juvenile mosquito biting me on my wrist. I squished her and she dropped to the deck and that was it. There’s no bite, there’s no welt, there’s no itch, there’s no nothing.

If this were a medical miracle, I’d be calling a medical journal. But it turns out, I’m just a less tasty chemistry experiment than I used to be.

Almost a decade ago, when the scale read over 200 pounds, I (sobbing and hysterical), broke up with my bad boyfriend refined sugar and dropped his pals, the daily carbohydrates, down to a minimalist crawl. I didn’t do it to fight bugs; I did it for my general sanity and health. But an unexpected side effect of nixing glucose as my body’s primary fuel source is that I seem to have dropped off the mosquito radar.

Back in the day, my summer self was basically a walking candy store. I loved a beach bonfire, and I was the first in line to roast a marshmallow to a perfect, toxic-black char, sandwiching it with chocolate into a gooey, dripping s’more. I used to joke that the mosquitoes bit me because I was so sweet. It turns out, that wasn’t far from the truth.

Apparently, these little buzzing vampires track us down using a sophisticated cocktail of heat, carbon dioxide, and the lactic acid on our skin. I don’t understand it all but apparently by cutting out the sugar and skipping the s’mores, I changed my scent profile. To a mosquito, I no longer smell like a five-star dessert buffet; I smell like a closed kitchen, lights out, the chef’s gone home. And when a ravenous Ms. Quito does manage to bite, like the opportunistic wrist-attacker this morning, my body doesn’t panic. Without the constant background buzz of sugar-induced inflammation, my immune system just shrugs it off. No histaminic drama. No welts.

It makes me think of Brian Moore’s historical novel Black Robe—or, more specifically, the actual historical journals that inspired it. If you’ve ever read the book or seen the movie, you know it doesn’t romanticize the 17th-century Canadian wilderness. It’s dreary, it’s cold, and the insects are a relentless, malevolent force.

That depiction is straight out of real-life diaries of the Jesuit missionaries who tramped through the Ontario bush in the 1600s. They wrote about the mosquitoes and blackflies as if they were a literal earthly purgatory. They were driven to the brink of madness, scratching themselves raw.

Yet, both the historical records and Brian Moore’s narrative note a baffling phenomenon: the Indigenous populations moved through the very same swarms with unfazed calm.

I used to think the First Nations people were just used to the bugs. But looking at it through a metabolic lens, their traditional diet kept them in a natural state of fat-adaptation. Their bodies handled the bug season exactly the way mine did this morning on the deck: with a cool head and zero interest in drama.

It turns out the best insect repellent for me in Skitter Country this season isn’t a spray or a smudge fire. It’s just steering clear of the marshmallows. I’ll let the birdies handle the aerial buffet while I stick to my morning decaf and my un-bitten ankles.

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If today’s story connected with your heart, you will probably enjoy my novels. They aren’t all the same flavour, but they all come from the same brain: curious, wry, emotionally nosy, and very interested in what people do when life gets life-y.

Start with Odd Mom Out if you like bad best friends, terrible mothers, bratty daughters, aging, reinvention, and the humiliating business of being human in public.

For a darker and more emotionally intense story in which a man must go back to his hometown and face the music while his girlfriend is left behind to figure out what’s happening on her own: Where the Night Winds Wail. (Ebook $0.99 until midnight on Sunday June 14.)