My wife said she saw a mosquito on her windshield the second week of February.

I reacted to this revelation much as I might if a doctor told me during a routine exam that he had spied in one of my kidneys an object that looked an awful lot like a golf ball, lacking only the Titleist logo and the dimples.

Lisa knows mosquitoes, so I could hardly toss aside her story as misidentification, much as I would have liked to.

When you’ve spent as much time as we have swatting wildly at the bloodsuckers, in our own backyard and in wilderness camps among other places, you tend to fix in your memory their characteristics from those rare, but savagely satisfying, occasions when you bring one down more or less intact.

(The bug’s carcass, often as not, plastered in a smear of your own blood. But when it comes to mosquitoes even the Pyrrhic victories are worth savoring.)

Lisa said the mosquito didn’t seem especially lively, but that’s slight consolation at best.

I don’t want mosquitoes in midwinter to be anything except dead.

The notion that skeeters might lie in a state of dormancy through the long winter troubles me greatly.

We used to call Mount St. Helens dormant, too, and look how that turned out.

Among the reasons I cherish Baker County’s climate, with its four distinct seasons and its broiling and frigid extremes, is the certainty that, come autumn, temperatures will plunge to levels generally fatal to insectile pests.

Few pleasures can compete with the ability to sit before a campfire, entranced by the flickering flames, and not be driven to the brink of insanity by the keening wail of mosquitoes running constant sorties around my ears.

Or to mow the grass and not have to stop half a dozen times to whack at the back of my leg or neck.

(These blows falling, of course, only after I’ve felt the nip, which means the bug has already slobbered its coagulating spit into my system and the itching will soon commence regardless of whether I smash it or, more likely, it evades. Mosquitoes, I’m convinced, can deal with G-forces that would leave a Top Gun pilot reeling.)

It’s not as though I’m utterly naíve regarding the life cycles of mosquitoes.

I have in the course of my work talked occasionally with professional mosquito-killers, and they have confirmed the terrible truth that certain species can survive even our harsh winters by sheltering in garages or other comparatively balmy places.

Now it happens that I don’t own a garage. Or lease one, come to that.

Most generally this is something I lament, since the absence of a garage requires that I scrape snow from windshields in one season and risk third-degree burns in another when I touch the steering wheel and gearshift lever.

But I derive a certain satisfaction from knowing that at least I’m not giving succor to snowbound mosquitoes even as I’m keeping my rigs out of the weather.

(Although I’m certain that if I did build a garage it would in short order attract, as a magnet does iron filings, so many items that I would end up parking outside, leaving my fingers just as likely to need skin grafts as they were before.)

The mosquito that Lisa saw might well have been an intruder, of course. There are many garages nearby, and mosquitoes, as my informed sources have also told me, can cover considerable ground, especially with the aid of a tailwind.

(Lest you needed another reason to despise the face-numbing gusts of winter.)

Yet as much as I abhor the thought of mosquitoes hunkering in manmade structures, waiting for the turn of the season, Lisa’s sighting is worse still.

I wasn’t even there but I still take the appearance of that single insect as a personal affront — a blatant show of buggy bravado.

It’s one thing for mosquitoes to hide out all winter.

It’s quite another when one has the cheek to land on a windshield, basking in the reflected warmth and showing off.

Mosquitoes lack fingers, of course.

But I imagine that proboscis could mimic a certain human gesture involving the extension of one appendage.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.