As I write this post, I swat a mosquito

I first moved to Houston in August of 1996 after college. I had never spent much time here, and I definitely felt like the country mouse visiting the big city. Skyscrapers, awful traffic, fancy shops, and all kinds of people. One of the things I noticed was how every afternoon at about 3:00, it rained. Without fail, thunderstorms at three o'clock, you could almost set your watch by it, very different from the central Texas Augusts to which I was accustomed.

It rained a lot actually. The streets would flood about once a month and it was always a major news story. Sadly, someone would always misjudge an underpass and drown. I learned how we were on a vast coastal prairie that was covered with concrete and that concrete was preventing the land from soaking up all that rain, like the sponge that it was. I say "we" because after a few years of living here I began to notice that despite the concrete, Houston was actually very beautiful. And very green. I would go home to San Antonio or to visit my grandmother in Lubbock or grandpa in Uvalde and notice that Houston was actually kind of like a tropical paradise. Lush green landscapes, a place where one house could have gorgeous tropicals and the next door neighbor could have a cottage style garden, all living in botanical tranquility.

Then in 2001, there was tropical storm Allison. I was heading to SA for a friend's wedding. I barely made it out. Hyphen didn't. He slept in his car on I-10 and when the water finally receded, he and a band of other unlucky motorists had to walk to some store that was open on the access road (in Houston they call access roads feeders) to let their families (some of whom were hysterical) know they were okay--this was bcp (before cell phones). Wow, that was a lot of parenthesis.

At the time, we lived in the Sunset Heights. It was an old neighborhood, and we didn't have proper drainage, just these huge culverts in front of our lots. After something like 35 inches of rain, they were really, really full. Actually the whole city was horribly flooded and we were very grateful that the Heights lived up to its name, our house was safe. The medical center basements were so badly flooded that the lab rats drowned and years of research was lost. Tragically, downtown, people were drowning in parking garage elevators, the symphony lost valuable sheet music and rare instruments and most importantly, something like 30,000 homes were flooded. But it didn't happen in New York, so most people never knew about it.

But back to our culverts. Afterwards, there were crazy mosquitoes. They would swarm you when you got out of your car and you had to run in the house. My dogs snouts were always covered with the the little vermin. Everyone was miserable. The 500 year flood, they said.

Fast forward to 2011. The driest year in recorded history. If you look at the tree rings, it is possibly the driest year in 300 years. Memorial Park? A wasteland of dead trees. Good ole Anise Parker, so fiscally responsible that she let them all die rather than water them. All the plants that are so used to getting so much water have not had a significant rainfall since sometime in 2010. Only people who are willing to pay the increased water rates are watering their grass and even in posh river oaks, there are brown yards. Coyotes are roaming the streets looking for food. I didn't even know we had coyotes. And the other night, I smelled a skunk. I felt like a city mouse visiting a place where there were skunks. Except the "place" was under my house, somewhere in the vicinity of the hall closet. Then about two weeks ago, it rained three inches.

Now we are fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood without culverts. But the post rain mosquitoes? Worse than tropical storm Allison mosquitoes. H calls them assassin mosquitoes. I call them rabid vampires mosquitoes on crack cocaine. But I can't run to the car, see? I've got kids. Two of them. And they take forever to get into the car. They swarm the car and we spend the first ten minutes of every drive killing them. My three year old, who loves all animals, knows how to swat them. My baby is so covered with bites she looks like she has some type of pox. My dashboard is littered with their tiny corpses--my own little hall of horns.

But there are people (dad) who read this blog who say climate change is just a bunch of hogwash. A 500 year flood. Two hurricanes. A drought to end all droughts, and for the past two winters we had weeks in the 20s. I may not be a scientist, but this little mouse smells a rat, and it not just the winds bringing in the Pasadena smell.