My wife texted me that she had killed a mosquito in our kitchen.

I would scarcely have reacted to this bit of news — other than to celebrate the demise of another pest — but for the date of the text.

October 10.

Now I abhor mosquitoes at any time.

(Most particularly when one is latched to my skin and its flying mate is flitting about my ear with its dentist drill whine, the audible equivalent of a kidney stone.)

I can accept that the bloodsuckers have their season, when the same balmy weather we bask in is also beneficent to bugs.

But nearly two weeks into October — and almost three weeks past the equinox — is definitely not that season.

Not supposed to be, anyway.

It’s akin to being menaced by a polar bear in an equatorial jungle, albeit that scenario involves a predator in the wrong place rather than the wrong time.

This far into autumn ought to have brought to our mountain valley at least a couple nights when the temperature dipped into the 20s, a level that causes gardeners to despair over their blackened tomato plants but can prove quite satisfyingly fatal to mosquitoes.

(I understand that the females have already laid the grounds for the following year’s assault, in the form of eggs that overwinter, but at least the biting pretty much ends with the coming of the hard frost.)

But instead of the typical chill of October we seem to be mired in a perpetual version of late summer.

The dogged refusal of one season to accede to the next is not without its attractions, to be sure.

I haven’t had to gouge at an ice-encrusted windshield, an exercise that inevitably leaves me with a scraped knuckle or, if the wind is fresh, a damp jacket from the mini-blizzard of my own creation.

But I would happily swap a sore finger for not having mosquitoes still menacing my kitchen at a time when there’s a bag of candy corn in the pantry and a carton of egg nog in the fridge, those tasty twin accoutrements of autumn.

(I don’t go in for pumpkin spice, which has become distressingly ubiquitous, but I never tire of the flavor of egg nog.)

The only annoying invader I’m accustomed to this late in the year is the willow leaf, that consummate hitchhiker, equally adept at riding the swirl of incoming air when the screen door is opened, or latching itself to a shoe sole.

There has been a “Groundhog Day”-style sameness to this early autumn that annoys me.

It’s not the consistent sunshine — that’s not terribly unusual in the waxing days of the season. October, statistically speaking, is the fifth-driest month hereabouts, with an average of about two-thirds of an inch of rain at the Baker City Airport.

But there is, it seems to me, a dramatic difference between the crystalline blue sky of true fall, when the middling warmth of midday begins to recede not long after noon, and the sullen skies we’ve been enduring, dull with wildfire smoke and, on occasion, dust from fields left fallow in deference to the drought.

Crisp is the adjective often deployed to describe a sunny fall afternoon, and I think it’s an apt choice.

But there is nothing crisp about days when the temperature nears 80 — not in October, anyhow.

I’m not pining for a blizzard or anything.

But I would welcome with gratitude a morning when I walk outdoors and feel my cheeks constrict with the chill, and immediately see my breath condense.

Pumpkin weather.

Elk season weather.

If there is smoke to be smelled I want it to waft over from somebody’s chimney, the rich and pleasant scent of seasoned lodgepole or tamarack, not the acrid tang of burned forest or rangelands.

I want to see the great walls of the Elkhorns and the Wallowas adorned again with the white they wear more often than not.

I want to stand on my back porch in the gloaming and relish that moment, when I first step inside, that the cold world outside gives way to the special warmth of home.

But mainly I don’t want to have to write about mosquitoes, or even to think of them, until spring returns to this land where winter can be cruel.

Especially to bugs.

• • •

It was a typical lunchtime conversation in the sunshine, except the setting was a lodgepole pine forest in the alpine wilderness rather than a sidewalk cafe.

We were hiking the Crawfish Basin trail in the Elkhorns, in the North Fork John Day Wilderness above Anthony Lakes, on Sept. 4.

We rounded a corner in the trail and my daughter, Olivia, and son, Max, who both have keener ears than either I or my wife, Lisa, have, said they heard voices ahead.

They were right. Two hikers, a man and a woman, were sitting on a log beside the trail, having a snack.

They told us they were from Walla Walla. The couple were friendly and, as pleasant people often are, inquisitive without being annoying. They focused their queries initially on Olivia and Max, an approach that in my experience is apt to impress the parents. I always appreciate it when adults treat children as worthy of joining a conversation rather than as mere spectators.

After we told the couple we were from Baker they quizzed us about other trails they ought to visit. Lisa and I mentioned several of our favorites.

While we were chatting there among the pines we saw another pair of hikers approaching. I did a double take when I recognized the man in the front was my son-in-law, Jesse Weitz. He and a friend were bowhunting.

So our group of six became eight, briefly.

One of the attractions of the wilderness, of course, is that the setting is dramatically different from the city cacophony of cars and voices and barking dogs.

Yet as much as I appreciate the silence and solitude of wild places, I also relish the chance encounters with people.

Almost always these incidental meetings are with people who have at least one thing in common — hiking — so the conversation tends to flow naturally.

I don’t suppose we’ll ever again meet the couple from Walla Walla.

But I was glad to have made their acquaintance, grateful that our paths intersected in a beautiful place on a fine late summer day, and that we could talk of other trails.