The leaves on the trees around my house are so smart! I just mowed over lots of colorful foliage that has already decorated my lawn. When my children were still living at home and would end their summer break to start a new school year, the trees would always start changing color that very day – as if on cue. I often imagined that when the trees in my yard saw my kids parading down the driveway in their new fall fashion to get on the school bus, the maples, the crab apples, the horse chestnuts, the black walnuts, the oaks, and the elms all decided that summer’s over and that they would like to change into a new wardrobe, too.

On the other hand, the mosquitoes around my house are really dumb. They don’t seem to have a clue about what time of year it is. Despite the fact that the low temperature has been in the 50 degree range several days over the past few weeks, they are still buzz-buzzing merrily along in my house. They bite me Hello when I enter my home. They bite me Good-night. They bite me while I’m sleeping, as if it’s still allowable according to their contract with summer. I know that technically it is still summer, but everyone else around me is behaving like it’s fall – with their morning sweatshirts, and their gold-orange-brown attire. So I feel that the mosquitoes should behave like it’s fall, too, and head to Zika friendly climates. The mosquitoes sticking around to watch Hoda and Kathie Lee on the Today Show with me as I do my morning chores strike me as an especially unintelligent lot (of the cousins marrying cousins variety who watch too much television). And I imagine that in December these mosquitoes will still be mindlessly cruising around my head and sucking blood out of my shoulder while watching TV with me (while wearing stocking caps and parkas because our house gets drafty in the winter . . . wait, that would actually be cute and would cause me to fall in love with them and try to make one of the mosquitoes my pet, but then it would eventually freeze to death because my Minnesota house gets really cold in January and all of my pets find a way to die tragically. So I guess I hope they don’t put on stocking caps and parkas).

I’m not sure how smart I appear right now. I’m still wearing short shorts and tank tops because I have a difficult time letting summer go, but I’ve pulled out my bulky sweatshirt from my fall wardrobe to wear as I walk around my house swatting mosquitoes each morning. I guess, like my inbred mosquitoes, I’m demonstrating neither smartness, nor dumbness.  I’m just caught in that confusing season called “fummer.”

I wish there weren’t any mosquitoes.

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