It is amazing that us baby boomers survived. There were few mosquitoes growing up in west Tx.  They were never thought of as much of anything but a mild deterrent to play and fun. You could always put on some pleasingly aromatic citronellol oil. Plus the fogging truck came by as regular as a German train every Thursday for us young and unknowing daredevils to run behind in the cloud of DDT sprayed into the evening cool. Besides if the itch of a bite got too much, there was always that soothing calamine lotion left over from a case of measles or chickenpox.

Nowadays we tend to worry of  these small pest as carriers of all kinds of evil virus like West Nile. As I sat in the glooming before the sunrise I heard the familiar circling buzz followed by just the smallest hint of a prick on my leg. My first inclination was to slap it dead and then run to the safety of my room. On second glance, I noticed the beauty of this creature I always shewed away. I  oddly enough felt a sense of bonding. Kind of like in an old TV westerns when two grown men for some reason or another would pull out their huge knifes and first cut themselves then pressing the bleeding wounds together. This created the mystical relation of a blood brother.

Some friends of mine and I just had to have some of that feeling. Heck, we hung together like brothers. The relation needed some kind of ceremony. Three of us were going to become blood brothers. Only problem was our knifes were dull and our backbones not yet fully formed.  We wimped out at the idea of self inflicted wounds. In what now seems a little gross, but a lot less painful, the three of us picked off fresh scabs from knees or elbows and let what little grit we had meld together even deeper.

So much for nostalgia, I made my photo of the mosquito that was sucking blood from my leg and then swatted him flat. So much for bloodbrothers.

Wear your repellant and be careful, it is a jungle out there. ††† en theos ††† jimwork