I love lizards, snakes, turtles, frogs, birds, bugs, sharks, whales, bats… I grew up exploring ecosystems in rural Indiana, northern Michigan, Grand Bahama Island (lots of wild lizards!), and New York City (lizards in pet shops). My Mom moved us to New York when I was eight. She is an artist. I remember loft parties in SoHo. One of my baby reticulated pythons escaped in a loft building. A year later we found him coiled on top of a refrigerator in the restaurant on the first floor. He was seven feet long and fat from eating rats.

I went to four colleges trying to be a biologist instead of a writer. On the fifth try at college, I got it right. Then I got my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College.

Here’s the beginning of a memoir I am writing called Lizards Saved Me.

Hot Weather Lizard

Sebastian is my prince. When I am with him my troubles go away for a while. He reminds me that I am not alone. Sebastian is a rhinoceros iguana big enough to hold in my arms with his feet on my waist and his hands on my shoulders. His horns are not big, barely bumps on his nose, but he is the most handsome rhino of all. His snout is long and elegant, his head is sculptural, I can cup it in both hands and kiss the two domes of flesh on top. Behind his scaly lips are many small, sharp teeth. When he shuts his eye, the soft, gray wrinkles of his eyelid really look rhinoceros. The folds of skin at his throat are covered in tiny scales that feel like raw silk. I press my face there and breathe in the mineral sea smell of his kind who have lived in the West Indies for thousands of years. When his eye is open, looking into mine I feel tightness in my throat and a longing to stay.

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 there on my grandparents’ Indiana farm, 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. When a crow flew overhead, she streaked across the patio taking my heart with her. The lizard 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. 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 while my mother finished her undergraduate degree at Indiana University in Bloomington, 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 the mice who lived in the pump house. I’d held baby starlings who fell out of the nest holes in the martin houses that stood on high posts in the field. They were in the same group as birds who came to the feeders. 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.

My mother had me when she was fifteen years old and when she was twenty-two, and I was seven, she moved us to New York City so that she could be an artist…

                                                                        ***

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…

Thank you for reading.

Here is a link to a podcast I recorded with the Western Sullivan Public Library:

https://wsplonline.libsyn.com/intersections-wendy-townsend-laura-moran