Before Hot Weather Lizard I knew a bullfrog, who lived by the ponds. One day there was a wedding at the house, my aunt Marcia’s. The photos in the wedding album help me remember this time. I was four-and-a-half years old wearing a white, puffy flower girl dress down to my ankles. In one photo Marcia bends at her long, slim waist to fasten the pearl button at the wrist of my glove, and listen to the important question I’m asking, which is, will you come see my bullfrog? She didn’t say no, but ladies wearing hats and flower-print dresses kept talking to her, so I went to him by myself.

The sun had gone down and over the chorus of clicking cricket frogs and green frogs the bullfrog called, rrraalmph, rrraalmph rrraalmph. The woods had come alive with insect voices. The trees were giants with thick, leafy arms open and I ran to them and down the path through the woods toward the ponds lit up by moonlight and lightning bugs flashing. Just past the cattails on the bank, my bullfrog sat in a patch of cool mud. When I came near, he jumped in with a splash and an uurrp. I stepped in the water and squatted to feel around in the mud and when my fingers touched silky frog skin, I brought my hands together around his body and caught him. I’d caught him before, more than once. He knew the routine. When I stood up his legs hung limp and dripping, and cool wetness seeped into the front of my dress. I wanted to lie down in the grass and be near him, under the stars and lightning bugs. But I could see lights from the house where my mother and Marcia and grandparents were. I kissed the bullfrog’s wet lips before I lowered him into the water and opened my hands to let him go.

The photos in Aunt Marcia’s wedding album were of a paradise I could not save. In what my grandmother called the sitting room there was a chair upholstered in shimmering pale green and gold silk and beside it a small end table with a shelf where I could count on finding the wedding album. Every time I visited Mooresville I went to the sitting room and sat down on the white wool carpet with the album in my lap. I liked the dresses and fanciness, but it was the green, wild woods and my grandmother’s flowers and shrubs growing around the house that I tried to keep alive for myself by looking at the photos.

It was summertime in Mooresville, Indiana and I was six years old when I saw my first lizard. I knew from pictures that lizards had scaly skin, different from wet-skinned salamanders who lived in the woods under rotting logs and damp leaves. I didn’t think lizards lived in Mooresville, since I never saw any. Then one hot day I was sitting on the ledge that went around the pool. I happened to look over by the dogwood tree with the low brick wall around it and I saw a dark, glossy-scaled creature slip out of a crack in the bricks. She had come from another time and place, I was sure. Thin gold stripes went down her body. She moved in spurts as though her muscles were so tightly wound they made tiny bursts of released energy. When a crow flew overhead she streaked across the patio taking my breath with her.

She showed herself only on the hottest days, so I called her my Hot Weather Lizard. I kept still and watched her flitting along the edge of the brick wall. I willed her to come to me. She moved like no animal I had seen, not just her ready-to-flee tense moves, but everything about her, even when she sat still, she was other.

That summer I was finding a lot of animals for the first time. I wanted to know who they were, and to learn their names. I had seen baby rabbits run out of their nest when my grandfather’s tractor came too close, and I could see that they were like mice. I’d held baby starlings who fell out of the nest holes in the martin houses that stood on tall posts in the field. They were in the same group as birds who came to the feeders. I saw fish in the ponds but couldn’t touch them. Moths, spiders, and dragonflies were bugs. Then, there were the wet and dry animals in a special group. These animals moved in different ways than all the others, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but alike enough that I was tuned into them, to how they were in time and space. They were tadpoles, frogs, toads, salamanders, turtles, and snakes. Hot Weather Lizard belonged in this group, the reptiles and amphibians. They were my people.