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.

If you remember what Severn Cullis-Suzki said in 1992, you can see even better why Greta Thunberg is angry.

“We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference…We raised all the money ourselves to come six thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, … I am fighting for my future… I am here to speak for all generations to come… I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard. I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go….

I’m only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil — borders and governments will never change that…”

            –From Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s speech before the UN Earth Summit in Rio, Brazil in 1992

I am standing at the kitchen counter making breakfast for my lizards when I have the impulse to turn around and there in the doorway, inches from the door saddle, is a praying mantis, watching me. I put down the knife I am using to to cut greens and go to the mantis and kneel to say hello, but gently, in case my voice or moving mouth frightens him. I put out my hand and he climbs into my palm. (Mantes sometimes move away from me when I’m in a hurry or haven’t calmed myself enough.)

Tiny black dots in his compound eyes —pseudopupils— follow my pupils. We are looking at each other and feeling curiosity, I think, and hopefully the connectedness is mutual. As always happens when I open to another creature –bug, bird, toad, lizard, turtle, snake…– my eyes fill and my throat tightens with such built-up love it nearly hurts. (It can happen with people, too, but I’m always ashamed of feeling way too emotional. Tears only make others uncomfortable, and make me feel like a child who can’t control herself.)

The mantis doesn’t mind my weepy eyes. I feel accepted by non-human creatures.

I carry the mantis to the small garden out in front of the barn, a mix of herbs, weeds, and collard plants for the lizards. I encourage him to climb onto the broad, horizontal leaf of a volunteer squash plant, next to one of its open yellow blossoms attracting bugs. Perhaps he will catch a meal.

After settling the mantis on the leaf I start picking cabbage moth caterpillars off the collard plants. I still feel the mantis’ companionship in the garden and also that of a male spider, pedipalps swollen, who is clinging to the leg of a stool nearby. Even though we use tons of organic compost to nourish the collards about 30% of them have been eaten by the fat little green cabbage moth caterpillars. I pick them gently, placing each one in a collard leaf cupped in my left hand, and when I’ve gone over all the plants I take the caterpillars into the barn to Luna, who eats them up, plus the collard leaf.

A friend took me to a rattlesnake den where I saw my first timber rattler in the wild. He was coiled, his scales a mosaic of brown ones against ochre yellow, his body and head absolutely sculptural and his eyes were gold with vertical pupils.

I saw at least twenty rattlers that day, because it was a sunny afternoon in May and the snakes had come out of hibernation, but were still near their den, resting in coils, basking around the rocks.

Among the snakes I was exhilarated, and also at peace. I felt connected to them and to their ancestral grounds that resonated with their energy. I wanted to write it down so everyone could know about these miraculous beings and what it was like to be with them.

Other things happened that day, wonderful things I wanted to write about, but that could not be published. I wrote a personal essay about rattlesnakes, but not my visit to their den. Here is the link to my personal essay:

http://talkingwriting.com/nobody-loves-rattlesnakes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+talkingwriting%2FafGZ+%28Talking+Writing%3A+The+Magazine%29

On St. Mark’s Place the rent was three hundred dollars a month. The apartment was on the first floor way at the back, like going back in time, and it faced a void between buildings and steel gates went across two tall windows, muddling the view, but letting in bright sunshine.

I put my futon on the floor of what might normally be a living room. If one had furniture, there might be a rug, a small couch, stuffed chairs, a lamp, maybe a coffee table and in the adjoining area, a desk and book shelves, and in the wide closet that led to the kitchen, one might hang clothes, and I did put mine there, but it wasn’t much, plus I needed the space for Mr. Boa. He coiled himself in the back and I hung a clamp light from the clothing rod with a red heat bulb.

It was my first apartment that I could set up the way I liked: Full of lizards.

When I think of St. Mark’s I see the sunshine pouring into that little room where I put Spot’s branch –the tree limb—and he is basking at the top under his Vitalite, watching over his territory.

With swollen jowls and dewlap pushed out Spot shakes and bobs his head, talking to the new young females Pooky and Snooky. Spot has never seen females of his own kind, and he watches them with wide-open eyes, awakening to the new, exciting things coming alive inside him.

The plumber stood in the middle bay of our barn, talking to my husband. Upstairs, Ava climbed down her ladder and started walking, kathump-kathump-kathump, down the hall and the plumber stopped talking and looked up. “I sure hope that’s a dog,” he said.

Ava climbs down from her sleeping box and walks her dinosaur walk, tail swishing side-to-side, from the north end of the barn to the southeast-facing deck. She crosses the door jam, claws clicking on metal, and she comes to rest on the sun-warmed oak boards. I spread a towel and sit down beside her. She tilts her head and peers into my eyes and my throat aches with love.

Ava senses the emotional shift and boosts herself like a cat, nose and tail raised, eyes shut, while I run my hand down her dry-silky flank and spikey dorsal crest. I put my cheek against hers and breathe in her sea mineral scent and I tell her what pretty nose horns she has.

When I lie down she climbs onto my stomach, scaly feet and claws not quite breaking my skin. She rests her chin on my chest, her belly on mine, and her tail drapes over my leg. She tucks an arm back at her side the way iguanas do when they are content, like it is the most natural thing for her to have a human basking buddy.

A snapping turtle at Higgins Lake

My aunt gave me VOYAGE OF THE TURTLE, by Carl Safina. One of the blurbs said: “Carl Safina is a rare breed of writer who doesn’t just do research to get the story, but enters the story and lives it [awesome so far!]… The result is a fascinating narrative that will appeal to a reading public beyond mere turtle huggers.”

mere turtle huggers

Why not just say the book will appeal to a wide audience; to readers unfamiliar with turtles?

I am a turtle and lizard and snake and tree and people hugger. Why do we shove animals and nature aside? “People first,” we say.

The clock is ticking on wildlife and biodiversity. I wonder how we will continue the everlasting fight for human rights, justice, peace, and ending world hunger on a planet that’s devoid of wildlife.

What about the Rights of Nature?

Here’s Birdfoot’s Grandpa by Joseph Bruchac:

The old man

must have stopped our car

two dozen times to climb out

and gather into his hands

the small toads blinded

by our lights and leaping

like live drops of rain.

The rain was falling,

a mist around his white hair,

and I kept saying,

“You can’t save them all,

accept it, get in,

we’ve got places to go.”

But, leathery hands full

of wet brown life,

knee deep in the summer roadside grass,

he just smiled and said,

“They have places to go too.”

Sebastian’s grandfather Mao and Me at Finca Cyclura, 1993

This is how it’s been lately.

I picked up cellulitis in my left foot. Don’t wear sandals to the airport. Mom urges me to the ER, for which I’m grateful. All those antibiotics and shots in the butt. Years of restoring gut flora with probiotics and fermented foods gone.

A forced time-out.

One good thing, I got my memoir draft in on time for a workshop. And I’m not in the hospital, I get to keep my foot, and all five toes. My digestion is simply over, though. The “gut-brain connection.” I’m proof that gut flora imbalance causes terrible mood swings.

I’m doing Dr. Schechter’s books, THINK AWAY YOUR PAIN and THE MINDBODY WORKBOOK. It started with Dr. John Sarno. I recommend it!

This work has helped me more than any special diet or exercise! More than herbs, acupuncture, a vegan diet, a raw foods diet, juice fasting, yoga, Pilates, biking, weight training, homeopathy, deep breathing. Writing down responses to questions about emotions and physical symptoms. Connecting to the subconscious mind which regulates autonomic responses. Seeing how subconscious rage and anxiety shut off blood flow in my gut.

My own most valuable therapy is Lizard time, when I let myself have it. My lizards keep telling me to slow down. “Be with us,” they say.

My writing trudges, isn’t snappy. I blame the antibiotics today. I am struggling to let go, struggling to not struggle. Struggling for self-acceptance. I remember when Norma sent me this poem:

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I’m telling you is Yes Yes Yes

—Kaylin Haught