One of the unfortunate casualties of the strife between us and the woods is the bluets. In May every year they blossom in pools and sprays among the dog violets and grass.

They’re never unsightly, like the unkempt hatcheted dandelion leaves that can make junkyards out of the lawn, and it would be much better for all concerned if their joyful little lavender-blue beauty could be preserved forever. Or at least through the best part of summer.

But it can’t. For living in the grass where the bluets thrive are things that are trying to eat us.

The black flies torment us for a few weeks in May, arising like minidemons from the flowing brook. They subside exactly on May 31, and the next day the mosquitoes appear. Mosquitoes spawn in standing water, which is abundant during May around our ledge-based yard. They sleep in the firewood lining the garage walls. But mostly, they live in the grass. The more grass, the better the lodging. Walk through the blades, and mosquitoes rise in clouds, out for blood.

Everyone knows how nasty mosquito bites can be. A fellow amateur naturalist once told me that in the upper reaches of Ontario, the summer mosquitoes are so thick they can kill a human being. The Indians smeared bear grease on their bodies against the bites, which were to be feared. I’m not sure whether this is true or not, but it seems believable, given what the insects do to us just in our yard.

Although I have to say, the worst mosquitoes I’ve encountered were not in Maine or Canada, but in China. Here, it’s the swarm that gets you. But in China, the individual is savage. In Shanghai, fat mosquito thugs lumbered through the air of our apartment with tweezy dangling appendages, ready to stick anything that sweated. They looked lethargic but had escape velocities of lightning compared to the dolts from Maine’s marshes. When one stuck you, you knew it. One bite injected enough poison into the joint of my thumb to swell it so hard I could not bend it for two days. The itch was more painful than any black-fly hole. We slept with the windows shut and sheets over our heads.

It’s really a case of us or them. I have to cut the grass, or we literally get eaten. In parts of the yard I put off the first mowing as long as possible because we like the bluets, but at some point in early June, they and the violets and the wild strawberry blossoms have to be cut with the grass.

One way of thinking about nature emphasizes the flagrant destruction humans have visited on it in the past 250 years. It wants to leave the bluets and everything else in their innocent state even if it means letting the mosquitoes inject you with viruses and the mice inhabit the walls. As dutiful followers of Thoreau, we should love the natural world and integrate ourselves and our peculiarly human moral vision into nature: Live and let live.

But you know, although Thoreau loved nature, he also had no delusion about it being benign. One of his many neglected points is that people need to carve a middle ground between the deadening aspects of civilization and the fatal wilderness. Human life is lived between these two worlds, where we make clearings – physical, aesthetic and moral.

If I don’t find ways to keep the mice at bay, they can make us sick innocently defecating in walls, and burn down our house innocently chewing wires. I love the bluets and the tall timothy and rye grasses. But if I don’t make it hard for them, the mosquitoes will innocently do their best to kill me.