Fecundity
28 April 2009
Things are different here all of a sudden.
The past two nights, thousands of tiny mosquitoes have tried to enter my cottage. They think they can just come in through the cracks around the window frame and bother me, and they are almost correct — but I still have these shrinkwrap-style plastic sheets up inside the windows. The winter ended all of a sudden and I haven’t taken them down yet. So the thousands of mosquitoes come in the window-cracks, encounter the plastic sheet, and then just accumulate, buzzing, in the three inches or so of space between window and plastic. Seething masses of them. If I go outside and shine a flashlight around the windows I see that there are further seething masses of them all over the external window frames, just waiting to get in and try their hands. It is like the Amityville horror.
So far they have not been able to penetrate, but I would like to be able to take that plastic down someday and just have normal windows.
And that’s not all. During the day, wasps come in at the rate of one every two or three minutes. The screen door does not completely close, and somehow the wasps, like the mosquitoes, find it easy to enter through the cracks. They generally remain in the vicinity of the door, where I don’t mind them except for the buzzing. Sometimes they fly up to another window — one the mosquitoes haven’t yet discovered — and crawl through a tiny hole in the plastic (that’s how I know the mosquitoes haven’t discovered it, because they would actually be able to get in there), and then end up, again like the mosquitoes, in a no-man’s-land between plastic and window, from which they seldom can escape. There are now numerous dead wasps there.
In a different window, the same thing happens with moths.
I don’t know how all of this has been decided, that the mosquitoes will take these two windows and the wasps that one and the moths another. But they are thoroughly segregated.
In the garden, there are rows of tiny arugulas and Chinese cabbages. As of this moment I have ten tomato starts and five eggplant starts in small pots. I carry them out into the sun every morning and back inside every evening when it gets cool. I just looked at them, and it seems one of the tomatoes has grown about a quarter of an inch in the last hour. I will transplant them to the garden when they are stronger. I water them from an old salt shaker.
Last night I garnished my dinner with some of the chives that are growing like weeds in front of the cottage.
Also last night, about a quarter to one, I heard hoarse screams from nearby. It was frightening; I thought something must be wrong. I grabbed a flashlight, tried to think of a weapon I could bring, failed, picked up my cell phone instead, and discovered that the battery had died. So I went outside with just the flashlight. Another scream came, from a house a bit farther down the road it seemed. Nobody else was around and no lights were on. It was, as I said, the middle of the night. As I started towards the house, another scream came from the forest, an entirely different direction. I stopped. It had occurred to me before that they might be animal screams, but they didn’t sound like the screams of any animal I knew, and I’d never heard them before although I’ve been living here since September. But I also had never been besieged by mosquitoes before. Perhaps, I thought, these are just things that happen at the end of April, and different things will happen in May and June, and by the time we reach September again I will have forgotten all about these mosquito-swarms and screams of April.
I listened to the screams long enough to convince myself that they did indeed come from some kind of animal. Finally one of these animals seemed to be coming towards me in the dark (I couldn’t see it, but I could tell by its screaming), and I hurried back inside. I don’t know what kind of animal they were. It is not impossible that they were a bizarre kind of bird. Or canids maybe. I picture them as jackals, with lolling tongues and cunning eyes, but probably there are no jackals in West Kingston.
Comments (5)
Fisher cat.
Did you ever find out what kind it was?
I don’t know what it was, but fisher cat is an excellent guess. I didn’t know this animal existed.
http://fishercatscreech.com/
I didn’t know it existed either.
We have a regular cat (not a fisher cat) that lives under our foundation, and I think its vocal cords, or whatever it uses to meow, are broken. It’ll come up to you and meow in a friendly way but it sounds exactly like a distressed baby. The other day, it had kittens, and then picked them all up and carried them away, except for one, which is now ours. We’re hoping the distressed baby noise isn’t genetic, but so far, it’s only making regular kitten noises.
The fisher cat is like Rhode Island’s living urban legend. Somebody told me that they can take down a horse. It’s not true, of course, but it’s still a frightening concept.