My Personal Plague

“Then the Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron, ‘Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the ground,’ and throughout the land of Egypt the dust will become gnats.” Exodus 8:16


Every year I am plagued. I am one of those people to whom blood-sucking insects are drawn. They love my pasty white legs and by the end of the summer I look like I’ve had chicken pox for the millionth time. I am also slightly allergic to their bites and usually a simple mosquito bite turns into something as big as a quarter that swells up and itches while I try to sleep. I take allergy pills when I am particularly ate up, just to keep the itching at bay. In other words, I hate mosquitoes!

Last night, after an evening trip to the clothing store to use a coupon card I got in the mail on some new duds for the husband, we returned home with a couple of blow up pool chairs that were 50% off. Of course the kids wanted to try them out and since the sun was going down, I thought why not? They’d not been swimming in two days since I was delinquent in putting the sunscreen on an ample amount of time before swimming on Tuesday and fried my little one’s arms. Dusk would not be a sun threat to them.

So while my children sat in the comfort of their blow up pool chairs (more like wrestled a large slippery beast that continually bucked them off), I sat on the bench and watched the sun go down… and the mosquitoes descend.

First they attacked my legs and feet, so I went to the garage and retrieved my can of mosquito repellent. I liberally sprayed my pasty whites with the nose hair frying spray and felt confident that this would relieve my problem. No such luck! The mosquitoes then began to swarm around my head. I couldn’t very well spray my hair down with the mosquito repellent since I know it contains something that melts off my toenail polish, so I resorted to spraying it up into the air around me to shoo off the little buggers.

Unrelenting as they are, this tactic was not successful in the least. I then grabbed the kids’ pool towels and shrouded myself with them around my face and neck – think colorful Mary in the Christmas pageant. Even this wasn’t good enough, as they could still find my lips, so I tightened my head gear to where only one lens of my glasses stuck out so I could still keep an eye on the children – blissfully swimming the evening away (Read: splashing each other and screaming their heads off). However, every time I would so much as peek out at to check out the mosquito situation, there were at least 50 of my little nemesis flitting around my shroud.

So I did what anyone else would have done – I retreated to the house!

What I thought was kind of funny about all this was that the children looked at me several times while I was hiding under the towels and never said ONE word! I guess they chalk this up to normal behavior and dress for their mother. They know me too well!

“So let it be written! So let it be done!” Yul Brynner as Rameses II in The Ten Commandments (1956).