Summer in the South is about being outside and battling mosquitoes in my part of Arkansas.
When I was growing up in northeast Arkansas, I remember walking outside and having mosquitoes swarm my legs, dozens at a time. The rice fields and water were heaven for the biting, disease-carrying insects.
As we often say, “The mosquitoes will carry you away.” Non-Southerners think we’re exaggerating. They have not experienced the Jumanji-like mosquitoes we have.
My husband and I still talk about the softball game he played in northeast Arkansas where the mosquitoes came in black clouds, attacking any spot of open flesh on your body.
We were invited into a stranger’s tent to save us from the mosquitoes, and we took them up on it.
Another memory is a Fourth of July at my parents’ house, where we all dressed in long sleeves and pants and sprayed bottles of mosquito repellent, even used a hand-held Thermacell repeller, to try to survive long enough to watch fireworks.
Some people don’t get bitten as much as others. I do not attract them as much as my daughter-in-law or sister-in-law, who are a treat for the buzzing broods.
My son said he has been known to turn on his phone flashlight as his wife is sleeping, get the flyswatter and track one mosquito in the room.
We were at my parents’ one recent weekend and went to my brother and sister-in-law’s house to play games downstairs. A door had been left open at one point earlier in the week, and they were still finding mosquitoes.
As we played a game, every once in a while, someone would slap another person’s leg or arm, midsentence, to kill a mosquito. (Either that, or it was a convenient excuse to let go of aggression.) I didn’t get a single bite, but my daughter-in-law and sister-in-law had several.
One mosquito proved elusive, and when it was killed, we all cheered and high-fived. My brother also killed one mosquito that had landed on a wall, and it looked like a crime scene. We’re not sure how one little mosquito could hold that much blood.
Our backyard was pretty full of mosquitoes earlier this year, and our sweet little 2-year-old was “eat up with them,” as we say in the South, in just a couple of minutes. She has apparently inherited her mother’s susceptibility to them. My husband sprayed the yard the next day, and they are mostly gone.
But it’s a constant battle. I have a friend who got a bug trap that she said worked well. I plan to order one.
And people tout brands of repellent like their favorite sports teams. I just read that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that lemon eucalyptus oil works as well as the chemical DEET. Other people swear by home remedies such as rubbing a dryer sheet all over you (a theory shot down by a consumer test).
I just realized by doing a Google search that there is an American Mosquito Control Association. Who knew? The last week in June is Mosquito Control Awareness Week. One of the suggestions on the association’s website is to apply “an approved repellent such as DEET, picaridin, IR 3535 or oil of lemon-eucalyptus.”
My mother sent us home with some body butter that a friend swears by, but we haven’t tried it.
We’re getting a good handle on the mosquitoes this summer. But these gnats are about to drive me crazy.
Welcome to summer in the South.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.