We’d catch blue-bellies in the woodpile. In the mid morning
they’d sun themselves. Snatching required patience and agility, skills on the
cusp of our ability. If you grabbed the tail, the lizard would detach itself, like unbuckling a seatbelt, and
you’d have a wriggling tail in your palm. And it was true, these guys had
colored stripes on their underside, but blue was too simple of a description.
The marks were paint pallet smears, blues and blacks and whites and on one
memorable occasion a vibrant purple; this was the branding of eyes.
Dad kept old Folgers coffee cans in the garage for their
utility. An old shelving unit held containers with screwdrivers, another with
bolts and screws, another with a socket wrench with changeable heads. The organization wasn’t pure and likely one
wrench would be mixed with the screw drivers or all the Phillips heads would be
in one place and the sole flat head would off with levels and paint can openers. Each container contained an assortment of mismatched screws at the bottom, some of which
had become too rusty to use.
If we asked, Dad would give us a couple coffee cans waiting
to be filled. He’d supervise us as we took a hammer and nail to the plastic lid
to make air holes. To this day that particular smell of metal and stale coffee
takes me back to sliding lizards into their new home. They’d only live for a
day. My next door neighbor kept his in a mason jar and it lived a week. We
turned to our parents for advice and they suggested some greens and dirt and such.
But the effect was the same, the lizard spending his remaining hours alert on
caffeinated air. So we stopped catching them.
Years later, it’s our job to clean out the garage.
Everything goes into three piles – keep, sell and trash. The last one grows the
quickest. I alternate between sorting and answering the questions of my
daughter who gleefully winds through the mild chaos. After an hour we’ve gotten
into a rhythm, but my hands pause on an empty Folger’s can. A plastic lid with
nail holes is snapped to the bottom. I turn to show jane and tell her about the
lizards, but she’s gone. No one has seen her. I keep my panic in check, looking to the woodpile to see if she has
wandered over there.
