Every summer, in subdivisions with Spanish names and no Spanish memory, the truck comes at dusk and breathes its fog over the hedges. The neighbors are grateful. They've been told the fog is mercy. What it actually is, is a confession — that we would rather poison the dark than understand it.
Here's the part the truck doesn't advertise. Fogging kills the adult mosquito for a night, maybe two. It also kills the dragonfly, the lacewing, the spider, the bat's supper — the whole quiet militia that was eating your mosquitoes for free, all season, asking nothing. The mosquito breeds in a bottle cap of water in eight days. The dragonfly takes a year. So you reset the board, and the fastest, hungriest, least useful thing on it wins, every time, by design. You haven't solved the problem. You've put it on a subscription.
My abuela ran a tighter program with a tin cup and a frown. She tipped out the standing water, moved the air, planted the things that fed the things that ate the things that bit you. El monte se defiende solo — the land defends itself — but only if you let it keep its weapons.
We're not anti-chemical. We're anti-ignorance. And the fog, lovely and blue in the headlights, is ignorance you can smell.