Living With Lizards

 

       Living With Lizards

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Last night when I swished back my bedcovers and hoisted my legs into bed, a small creature slithered from top to bottom of the bed on the other side. My immediate fear was of a scorpion. My fear was immediately relieved by my astute scorpion knowledge. This critter was too skinny, it didn’t attack and the outline shape didn’t fit. Whew!

The part of me which wanted to ignore my bed partner was overruled by the part of me which had to know. Out of bed and around. Oh, cute. A baby gecko, about two inches long. I left the child perched on the lower corner and climbed back into bed.

I know an adult gecko lives in my bedroom. I’m familiar with it, used to her presence. She’s lived with me for months, perhaps years. I give it no attention except an occasional, “Nighty night.” She likes to hang onto the window screen, hoping a mosquito will slither through the mesh, which happens. It talks to me most nights. I don’t speak lizard, so I’ve no idea what she says. In the daytime, the gecko hangs out behind a picture frame.

When I first moved to Etzatlan, whenever I would spot a lizard, any lizard, seen because they move so quickly, I would startle. You know. The involuntary jump, heart in throat, squeak response. Lizards come in several sizes, colors, styles. They blend into their backgrounds so well, you hardly know they are around until they move. Those little guys are whip fast. In short time, lizards became background to me. I see them everywhere, and now I hardly register that they are present.

Of course, there are iguanas too, a different creature entirely. I appreciate lizards, including the geckos, for eating ants and flies and mosquitoes, of which, there are too many. Iguanas are vegetarian, favorite food being my hibiscus blossoms, preferably each eaten in a whole gulp. I’ve considered making iguana soup, or iguana on a stick. Tastes like chicken, right?

Back in bed, my mind wanted to play a game: If a mama gecko hatches one egg, how many eggs might a mama gecko hatch? I told my mind, “Shut up and go to sleep. I’m too tired to play.” Sometimes that works. Do they lay eggs? That started a whole new train of thought? Where is papa gecko? Is the gecko I heard outside my living room window really inside my living room? Soon the boxcars began lining up on the siding.

I’m tired and a tired mind makes up its own stories. Do we need a daddy gecko? How many geckos live with me? Do they go outside? How do they get inside/outside? Chug, chug, toot, toot. I recalled picking up two kernels of gecko, uh, evidence, from beneath my coat rack by the door. Finally, the train motion lulled me to sleep.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

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Perceptions

 

       Perceptions

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While mopping my floors, I escorted an ant out of my house and set it free. Do not get excited. I don’t know why I did not squash it underfoot as I usually do. Ants are the bane of our lives here. So many sizes. So many varieties. A never-ending supply.

Don’t even think that I’d gotten Zen over that ant. I didn’t even give it thought. Simply picked it up in my fingertips and flipped it out the screen door.

If I had been going Zen about anything, I should have been concerned for my newest house guest, Pierre, the lizard, around which I had just swished my mop, one of the small variety, quite capable of startling me several times a day. It is not a gecko. I don’t see gecko feet.  I’ve not heard the gecko bark and we’ve shared space this past week. My discarded ant could have contributed to Pierre’s food supply. Lizards eat bugs. Ants? Spiders? Bugs of which we have plenty, outside, not in my house. Okay, some in my house.

I am quite capable of reading deeper, esoteric, meaning into any situation and being utterly wrong. Perhaps over-thinking is a form of self-entertainment. No Zen this time.

Yesterday, mid-afternoon, the sky suddenly loomed low and black. I went outside and looked up toward the top of the mountain. I swear I could hear the rain coming. I, quick, wrote to my daughter, Dee Dee, “I hear the rain hitting the tree leaves, looks like a huge storm. I want to let you know we might lose power.”

At our elevation, most of the trees are broad leaf types. (We have some pines, which I call frothy pines because the clusters of needles look frothy.) When the rain hits the broad leaves, it is noisy like hail falling.

Swoosh, down the mountain the storm roared. An hour later I wrote my daughter. “Well, that went over in an instant. We had gusty wind, a light sprinkle, the black clouds rushed over and beyond in mere minutes. The noises I heard? Wind rustling the leaves, not rain. Not rain. I was wrong.”

A couple of weeks ago our rainy season began. Rain daily, rain nightly, with hardly a pause. I like rain. No complaint about rain. This year we have a different pattern to the rain. Since living here in the sub-tropics, what I have known, what I expect, are sunshine days and rainy afternoons and evenings. What are landed with this time around are gray, gloomy, wet days, all of them. I’m not saying this means anything. It just is the way it is.

I will say that with a solar water heater, a good day is a day when we have enough hot water that I can shower, even when the water is not scalding hot like I want it! I like my solar water heater. However, it does require significant patches of sunlight. My water is cold. My house is cold. Last night I went to sleep with my wool socks on my feet, thinking about sliding a pair onto my hands.

Oh, well. Ants are not important. Rain will fall. Sun will shine. People are important.

A couple weeks ago my daughter went to Great Falls to attend the memorial for her Aunt Lois. She met up with, connected with cousins she had not seen in too many years, not since all the cousins were curtain climbers.

A sad element of divorce is that relatives get displaced or misplaced. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we, with one judgment, cut off half our family? These young men are my nephews. I wish I could have gone with her. I have some stories I could have told. Lois was only a year or two older than me. Our lives split off in different directions.

Speaking of different directions, Where, oh where is my Pierre. I hunted here. I hunted there. I looked around most everywhere.

I’d become enamored with my little companion. He was no longer afraid of me though I must have loomed large in his life. Maybe he left family out in the rock garden. Maybe he’d only come inside to explore. Maybe he discovered that the grass was not greener. Maybe he wanted his mommy.

Pierre the Lizard has done a flit. He has escaped the confines of domestic life and is once more at loose in the wilds. I feel bereft. I kind of miss him.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

July 3, 2025

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I’ve nothing to say.

 

I’ve nothing to say.

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Truly. I’ve nothing to say. My mind is fried, blackened to a carbon crisp beneath the unrelenting heat dome. The way it is today is the way it will be forever and ever, amen. I know that is a big, fat lie, but it is the way I feel. Discouraged.

Every morning I scurry to get basic cleaning done before 9:00 because three-digit heat comes with companionable dust. I knock back the most visible dirt and mop the floors because that layer of dust is slick and slick is dangerous to old feet. There is no sense doing a big clean because at the day’s end, dust is back thick and thicker, thanks to a huge construction project up wind.

I hope you never experience a heat dome, like being under a lid on a boiling pot, but even with a normal high summer, please be careful of yourself and with those around you, making sure your family, friends and neighbors stay hydrated, stay safe.

As careful as I am, I’ve had several bouts of sickness from the heat. I suspect that once you’ve been fried, you are more vulnerable. The worst part of it for me is feeling completely drained of energy, to a point my mind quits working, similar to a minor depression. I take another shower. I may be sweaty but I am clean sweaty. 

 In support of another hot topic, “Women of the world, unite!” We will have a new presidenta in Mexico. She gives us hope. When I first typed the word “unite”, I typed “untie”. Perhaps it was not a mistake, but a happy accident. We live in hope that women of the world get a chance to untie many of the knots of the past. That, my Dear, is as political as I am willing to get. In public.

I’m more than willing to be silly. Four of us women are visualizing lifting the heat dome. We are. Visualizing. Up, up and away.

My house has become a haven for lizards. Why? Lizards thrive in hot sun. Don’t they? It is only marginally cooler in my house than outside on the rocks. The creatures must crawl in beneath the gap at the bottom of the screen door. I did not invite them. I do not encourage them. I made attempts to catch and release. Don’t laugh. Lizards 3, me 0. I give up.

Why do lizards want to be inside? I can’t imagine. Maybe in search of water? Lizards eat bugs. Maybe if they stay, they will rid my house of spiders, ants, flies and mosquitoes, the occasional earwig or roly-poly bug. I hope I have enough house bugs to keep the lizards fed. Don’t ask me where that thought originated.

You may think my house a bug haven. It is not. Which is why I worry about the lizards. I hate to think of a lizard gasping its last in starvation agony behind my book case. On the other hand, they found a way in. There are an equal number of ways out.

Every day I check the long range weather forecast. Every day I see the same page. I suspect the weather people are on vacation in Antarctica and have set their computers to “rerun”.

I look for disturbances out in the oceans, anything which might mean change is coming our way, some day, soon. Nary a cloud in any sky. The NOAA people have put hurricanes on hold, not that I want a hurricane, but, guilty confession, hurricanes do bring cooling rains.

Trying anything to keep up my spirits, I focus on the birds. The Bird of the Day, my call, is the “Let-it-go” Bird. This is a year-round bird, here every day. Its song is just that, “Let-it-go, Let-it-go, Let-it-go”. Good advice any day.

“I’m trying to let it go, bird, I’m trying.”

There goes that pesky fly again. Where is my lizard when I need one?

I’m sorry. I really have nothing to say.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

June has arrived

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Creatures Great and Small

Creatures Great and Small

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Though not the least bit dangerous, Argentine Ants win the grand prize for pesky, irritating, prolific and impossible to be squashed with any permanence. You in the North Country don’t have to worry about them. So far they have learned to inhabit only tropical and sub-tropical climes. I say ‘so far’. 

Adaptable little creatures they are.

They neither bite with fire nor leave welts. They don’t strip entire trees overnight. They don’t chew the furniture.

However, one this moment is traveling along the bottom rim of my reading glasses, left to right, cross over the nose piece, left to right along the other rim, about face and right to left, back again. Cheeky little bugger.  

Argentine Ants are year round, ever-present, and occupy my house. May is our hottest month, smack in the dry season. Argentine Ants particularly like to hang out in the kitchen, on the counters, in the sink, in search of moisture. If, however, I miss wiping a bread crumb off the counter, ants will call in a moving crew and will make short work of it.

I’m vigilant. I scrub assiduously. I keep a spray bottle of vinegar on the counter. Ha! Drops them in their tracks. Despite my efforts, I’ve eaten some, swallowed ants in glasses of water. Small, tasteless, harmless. I try not to think about it.

One of my friends asked me if I thought animals were bolder, now that people are not moving around so much. You know—people off the streets and animals reclaim territory. She recently had spotted a fox and a coyote in her yard.

My theory, and I can roust up a theory for any occasion, is that animals aren’t behaving differently, people are. People in place are not rushing about, focused on getting hither and yon. Consequently, people are noticing critters that are always there. It’s all about focus.

Two days ago I had a lizard in the house, crawling up my screen door. He was a little guy, about seven inches, nose to tail. Lizards are insect eaters, love those flies and mosquitoes and smaller bugs. So I like lizards.

But this guy is not a house lizard, not a gecko, so I escorted him out to the patio. He might have been fine inside, companionable, but I did not enjoy contemplating the possibility he might creep across my face in the night in search of one of those small gray flies or an errant Argentine Ant.

Yesterday I went to the patio to grab my mop. I always flip the mop-head about a bit in case a scorpion has crawled into the long cotton fibers. Out popped a fat pregnant mouse. She’d made a lovely nest in just two days. A shame to disturb her. But along with lizards, I don’t want mice living in my home. I’m not that lonely yet.

Today, while walking along in the shade of the jacaranda trees, thinking about a friend’s grievous situation, I had a clear picture of my Dad, with the saddest expression on his face.

Dad’s been gone several years. We have better communication now. He seems to know when I need a visit.

Dad reminded me of a time when I lived in Great Falls. We’d motored out to Wolf Creek Canyon for a family picnic. This was back in the mid-‘70s when I made the most disastrous decision of my life. 

Dad knew he could say no words to help me; he knew that I had to figure it out and save myself.

I had snapped a photo of my Dad and that picture reminds me as nothing else can, of the depth of his love for me. “Ah, Dad, I understand now,” I told him.

Resident animals are a great distraction, enabling me to avoid talking about a difficult situation. 

Somebody close to me, one whom I love, is about to make, or has made, a disastrous decision, guaranteed to bring years of pain.

There is nothing I can do, nothing I can say. I know you know what I mean. It hurts. We all have someone close to us and, helpless to intervene, we have had to watch him/her walk off a cliff. All we can do is love them and hope to help pick up the pieces.

So I distract myself with ants smaller than ground pepper, lizards and mice.

And crows. I seldom see crows in this neck of the woods. Grackles, yes, small blackbirds, yes. 

Crows, no. Look at those two clowns. In inimitable style, remind me of Heckle and Jeckle, the cartoon magpies, swinging through the branches like acrobats, making me laugh. It helps.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

May 7, 2020

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Leaping Lizards and Gripping Geckos

Leaping Lizards and Gripping Geckos

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            Lizards startle me. Back in the long-ago days when I rode horseback to check cows, now and then I’d see a flash of movement when a lizard sunning itself on a rock was equally startled by me. My mouth emitted a screech without my permission and my heart swung into overdrive. I couldn’t help myself. Meanwhile the lizard disappeared behind, around or under the lichen encrusted rock, a perfect habitat for its lichen colored skin. 

Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of lizards in eastern Montana. More fortunately, my horse was smarter than me and had become used to my ways. Otherwise I surely would have been dumped into the prickly pear.  To snakes I reacted even more loudly but my horse simply flicked back his ears and carried on. 

            Even harmless salamanders gave me the heebie-jeebies. When I was young, a trip down into the dirt cellar beneath the kitchen for a quart of pickles was an exercise in courage. No, that’s wrong. It was an exercise in fear.  

            It is a surprise to me that I’ve become quite fond of iguanas, not the most handsome of beasts. But you know how we women are; we can become used to anything.

            There had to be geckos in my apartment. Clues were there for me to read. I moved to this place in November. It is hardly airtight. When I opened the door to come in or go out, often a fly or mosquito from outside would, uninvited, flit through. I might spot the insect once or twice and then it would disappear. And I never swept its little carcass off the floor. So where did it go? 

            Geckos have a distinctive chirp when calling to one another. I hear them every day. Chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp. I scanned the walls. Searched the corners. Looked behind dressers, into the dark places. I never saw a gecko. Week after week. Month after month. Nada. Nothing. 

            Despite my distaste for lizards, I like geckos. I recognize their service to humanity. Anything that eats mosquitoes is a friend of mine. Bats, swallows, geckos. Bring them on. 

            Now I must explain that mosquitoes here are wimpy. Days go by and I never see one of the little pests. Compared to the mosquitoes-on-steroids we breed in the Milk River Valley, the variety here is the 98 pound weakling. We sneeringly kick sand in its face. However, small and seemingly harmless, it carries dengue fever, which is nothing to sneer at. So bring on the mosquito eaters, I say. 

            Sunday, near evening, I was sitting at my dining table eating pitayas, the fruit of cactus, of which I’ve grown quite fond, when a pale green gecko skittered up the wall and darted behind a painting. “Samantha,” I said, “I knew you were here.” 

            Silently I thanked her for keeping the bug population down. I was nearly giddy with excitement. Monday night I was propped on my mound of pillows, reading before lights out, when across the room a light tan gecko popped from behind the dresser and raced up the wall and with gripping huge foot pads, cut across the ceiling at Interstate speed. I promptly named it “Sam-I-Am.”  

            Isn’t this strange. Two geckos in two nights.   

Tuesday night I went to the kitchen to refill my water glass and a smaller pale green gecko dashed across the floor in front of me. “Samish.” 

Wednesday night, a darker brown gecko made tracks across the living room wall. “Son-of-Sam.” Is there a pattern here? 

My theory is that gecko spotting is much like deer hunting. In my first hunts along the coulees, I never saw a deer. My husband would see twenty. Gradually I learned their habits. I learned to watch my horse’s ears; to watch where he put his attention. It seemed as if I imagined the outline of a deer and the deer would walk into that outline becoming visible. Same technique with geckos.

I have a great “Hands-Across-the-Border business idea—to export geckos to the Milk River Valley.  Customers will line up to buy my little mosquito eaters. Each gecko will come with a name and pedigree, like Beanie Babies. Geckos will become a national craze. They are the perfect pet, quiet, nocturnal, unobtrusive. They don’t climb on furniture. The shed their skin but then they eat it, cleaning up their own mess. Wintering might be a challenge, but, small problem, easily solved. We’ll sell them in colors, stripes or speckles. We will employee hundreds of people. 

Already my friend Kathy and my daughter Dee Dee want a piece of the action. Geckos-R-Us. 

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

May 29, 2014

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