Moving Drama

From James Schaap

Rained here Saturday night. My father-in-law's little gauge--the old farmer in him couldn't really live without one--registered three-quarters of an inch, a healthy rain.

In town, where we live, a good rain is nice on the lawns but a curse on two-year-olds like our grandson, who's too darn cute to spray full of "Off" and too little himself to slap the blasted mosquitoes that appear as if out of nowhere and then light on his feastable chunky arms.

We don't live in real mosquito country here in Iowa. They can get bad, but nothing at all like my Wisconsin home, where, come June, hordes rise like Chinese armies from a solitary backyard. Clouds form in a village park. You can hear them, like a distant jet.  I'm serious.

It's a wonder people don't die from mosquitoes in Minnesota, where some claim them as the state bird. Michigan, on the same northern tier as Wisconsin and Minnesota, almost has to be similarly cursed. Here in Iowa, we love "up north," but there have been times when I felt all 270 pounds of me being carried away by winged varmints that look as much like biblical demons as anything God, in his infinite wisdom, ever created.  In fact, you wonder sometimes whether He left some factory seconds around, some "oops," you know? What possible good are mosquitoes?

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