Chasing the mosquito man, running in the big blue DDT cloud 

It was best to be a kid on those hot days. Butterflies flew in on their magic carpet colored wings and lit on the damp clothes on the back yard line.

Some days you found red ants in the cracks of the sidewalk. You could watch them for hours. Or stomp them. Other days you watched black ants carrying crumbs off to a hole in the pavement. Sometime you tried to get a war going between the red and the black ants.

Then Grandma came out with the pot of boiling water and you watched the ants float away.

On hot July nights, besides world famous New Jersey heat and humidity, you could count on mosquito bites and fireflies in the night.

You could never find a mosquito truck when you need one.

On our dead end street we kids stayed out as late as we could. We played hide and seek or if we had a big ball, we played Sputnik. We'd come in and pour the calamine lotion on the bug bite welts. The rich families on the block had a window fan or two. The rest of us awaited a summer breeze through the window screen and the gossamer curtains.

We probably had the same cycle of boom and bust years for critters then as now, but, frankly, there weren't nearly so many houses in our suburbia. The critters had their place and we had ours. Who would have known if there were a lot of bunnies running around. Our cats ran the night and dogs wandered the day. Critters steered clear in those days.

This year, in our suburban town north of Newark, we've seen a lot of bunnies, chipmunks and squirrels. Some years we run into a lot of raccoons or skunks. We'd rather run into bunnies than skunks. Too bad there isn't a Mosquito Man for skunks.

I wonder where the critters go in their off years, and what calls them back in those great numbers when they are on?

It must be a lot like the lightning bug. Around here we only see them in June and July. They light up fields and back yards in summer with their private fireworks.

Kids will always chase and catch fireflies. For bugs, they fly darn slow. And low. They fly darn low, low enough for a child to reach up and catch them or watch in wonder as they alight on a tiny hand or finger.

Last month Ask Marilyn, in the Sunday Parade, wrote about fireflies. Marilyn vos Savant took the wonder out of the insects by explaining where they come from and where they go. The short answer is, the light thing, it has to do with mating, in case you didn't know.

Why is it always a little boy somewhere whose sole desire is to see what makes the little bug light up? Boys always take apart their toys to see their guts and what makes them run. Why can't they just catch them and put them in a jar with some pulled grass, and a wax paper lid, and watch them light and go dark until the sandman arrives? Those bugs were usually dead by morning light.

These days, the mosquito commission uses whirlybirds to spray swaths of bug killer over a city. Meanwhile, smart fireflies keep moving to the country. They keep finding the country is further and further away.

Now, when we see fireflies on summer nights, it seems to say we are no closer to dousing that little light of theirs than we are to clearing the bog of mosquitoes.

As man has proven himself an inept caretaker of the earth, so far, the earth has rebounded. With each round, it seems the mosquitoes get stronger and more resistant. Some day we'll look out our window from our air conditioned house and see a mosquito as big as a jetliner.

Some day the species you'll see only in a book will be man.