Enjoy it while it lasts
When I was a kid, our family used to go to a summer house in the archipelago. And old fisherman hut, far out with no running water and no electricity. There was no shortage of mosquitos, however. I have always kept that summer house in the back of my head as a reference point of how bad the mosquito situation can be. And there hasn’t been any motivation to revise it. At least not until me and my wife moved to our current home.
We live by the ocean, surrounded by forest. And there must be a lot of wetlands in the forest, because this place is like mosquito heaven. What has been most fascinating to me is how fast they arrive when their “time is right”. In the spring and early summer, our home is the perfect paradise for a short while every year. The reason I call it perfect is because there is a miniscule time window where there are no mosquitos at all. They don’t seem to wake up until the “real” summer arrives. I am talking about the very specific overlap between spring and summer. You get the warm and nice climate, and you can stay outdoors indefinitely. But inevitably, the mosquitos will arrive. And when they do, they do it properly.
I remember last year. I had a wonderful evening walk with my Labradors in the forest, with not a single mosquito in sight. And the next day I could not breathe without inhaling them. Literally. That’s how brutal the contrast is here. I did one mistake last year, however. We do have one of those propane powered mosquito magnets, and they work very well. If you turn them on that is. The Octenal pills and propane bottles are expensive, so the running costs of a mosquito magnet are pretty high. That’s why I postponed turning it on until the mosquitos arrived. I didn’t expect to go from zero to one billion in a matter of hours though. I learned my lesson this year and flicked the switch about a week earlier, when my gut feeling told me to. And this year it has been somewhat better on our premises. But as soon as you wander off outside of the range of the mosquito magnet – God be with you!
Last autumn we had a horrible storm that fell a huge number of trees. Some of them fell over our tennis court, damaging our fence in the process. I wasn’t able to fix it in time before the winter, so it was on the top of my to-do list this spring. And last weekend I had such a strong gut feeling, that I must go and fix the fence NOW or risk being eaten alive by postponing. I chose the first alternative and got to work and fixed the whole fence in a day. If I would have tried the same work this weekend, it would not have been pretty. I am therefore very grateful to my past self, that I did not postpone and instead just did it.
The moral of the story with the mosquitos is that you must learn to enjoy the moment while it lasts. Time flies so fast you can’t even grasp it. That’s actually the best thing with the mosquitos. They really remind me to be present and to not miss the important things. If I will become old, maybe one day I will look back at the time when my kids were growing up – which is the very definition of “peak life” – and be grateful that I chose to enjoy it while it lasted. Just like those short days in the early summer before the mosquitos come.