Wild Kingdom

Saturday, after we returned home from our trip up the mountain, we drove home through a long, constant deluge.  As we pulled into the driveway, I thought I noticed something on the glass sliding door of the breezeway, some bloblike, greenish thing, that I was pretty sure didn’t belong there.  Sure enough, we entered the house and found a tiny, tiny frog – toad, maybe?  since there are no lakes around here?  but bright green and slippery – about the size of my thumbnail.

The kids were enthralled, in their usual ways: Emily pounced at the chance to hold it, dawdled over the process of letting it go, and mae any number of girly, “Awww” type noises.  Jacob watched, fascinated, from a safe distance.

This morning, Emily and Willem were up and off to their respective schools, and Jacob and I lazed around the house for an hour or so before getting dressed and ready for the highlight of our social agenda on Mondays: the grocery store.  Our living room and kitchen are open-concept, with an eight-foot-wide doorway between, and I am completely certain that the floor was clean, with no stray toys or pens or critters anywhere within sight.  In the time it took me to move six steps from the doorway to the fridge for the shopping list, Jacob squealed, “Mom, there’s a lizard in here!”  Yeah, sure, right, kiddo.  We have never once seen any lizards at all anywhere on the property – except for the one on the roof – since we moved here.  I’m sure you’re just imagining —

Oh.  Look at that.  There’s a lizard in here.

It was a little thing, maybe three inches long, with a tiny snakelike body and black, shiny, sticky skin.  It was vaguely like a newt in the way its feet were, but it was narrow the whole length, without a fatter belly area, and it moved fast.  I scooped it up and cupped it in both hands to get it out of the house, all the while disagreeing with its apparent insistence on showing me its imitation of a lemming.  I got it outside, where it promptly hid in the floor mat by the breezeway – which, great idea, how’s about you hide in the precise place where we wipe our feet? – and later snuck off into the front garden and away to its lizard lifestyle.

Bizarre, especially because in three-plus years of living here, we’ve never encountered either lizard or amphibian inside the house.

Off we went, then, to the grocery store, and bought makings for chili and lemon pie and various other household necessities (why, yes, I did buy chocolate and ice cream, why do you ask?).  We headed out to the parking lot, and Jacob climbed into his seat and buckled himself in while I unloaded the cart.  I pushed the empty cart over to the little corral thing, and glanced to my right.

Several yards away, there was a crowd of six or eight people, staring at something on the ground.  It was largeish – at first I thought it was a hat or a purse, but then thought it was too big for that (not being in Texas, you don’t see a lot of cowboy hats around here), and when it suddenly stood up on four legs and started tiptoeing away, I was certain it was not a hat.

No, it was a turtle.  So I scampered over to the car, quickly unlatched Jacob and carried him over to share in the excitement.  The shell was approaching two feet in diameter, and it was a snapping turtle – ask the 20-something guy holding it how he knew – and all in all was big and healthy and, well, turtlelike.  A few members of the crowd walked it over to the fence at the side of the parking lot, on the other side of which is a marshy, swamplike area, and one guy held up the bottom of the fence while the other one encouraged (in the form of a sneaker to the tail) the turtle to go on home.

And thus it did, thereby – for now, anyway – ending my adventures with wildlife for the day.  I would by no means consider our town to be citylike, but at the same time it’s developed enough that these sorts of encounters are few and far between.  Except, you know, when they all clump together at once.