LIZARD Chapter 17: TRYING TO KEEP LIZARD ALIVE

She'd put him outside in the morning in the sun to charge him up. 

But the birds kept coming around and she was afraid they would eat him.  So she found a laundry basket and put him under that to protect him.

...But the moment she walked into the house he got right out.  

So she figured he could get back in if he needed to. She set his favorite red rock outside the basket and he sunned himself on that in the shadow of the basket.

She would spray him from time to time with "Nature's Antibiotic", a natural immune fighter. She figured it couldn't hurt. She was concerned that it had been over a week since he showed up and he hadn't had anything at all to eat.  

The next day she went to PetSmart. She wanted to find food that he would want to eat. They suggested crickets. She cringed. She loved every creature on the earth and she didn't want to buy the crickets just to be preyed upon, but then she figured that this was their destiny anyway. So she bought 20 of them and she bought some mealy worms too. Then she bought an aquarium--not to contain Mr. Lizard, but to contain the crickets and the worms so that he could eat them. 

She would put Lizard in the sun all morning and then she would put him into his Cafe Aquarium for the afternoon. 

It seemed quite a good set up.  Rocks and branches and crickets and worms and herbs and carrots and spinach and a little tray full of water.  

He spent all day one day laying in the tray of water.  Meanwhile the crickets walked all over him -- around his mouth and head. His eyes were still closed. The worms creeped alongside him. He paid no attention to any of them.

The worms ate the carrots and then the crickets started eating the worms.

He didn't seem to be benefitting from the "restaurant".  She bought canned crickets and mushed them up in water and fed him with an eye dropper. He took a little bit of them but not much. 

When she bought the canned crickets she was told "Be careful because they will start eating him if he isn't active and if he doesn't eat them."

This aquarium "restaurant" idea wasn't working out too well. 

Lizard Chapter 16: THE CYCLE of DEATH AND REBIRTH of a LIZARD

An hour later the sun was pouring down on him and he was once again puffed up, standing erect and walking and hopping around on her lap and on the bench outside where they were. She was very happy to see him so active.  She thought he might have a chance. There were no more traces of blood on him and his bad eye even seemed to be healing for by morning, Monday, it was no longer caved-in; it just looked closed. 

She placed him on the stucco wall where he had always been at home.
He stayed wherever she put him. He wouldn't move.

Mr Lizard never opened his eyes. She wondered if he was blind. She knew he wasn't deaf because he seemed to hear her in the moments when he was alert. She also found out that he was quite sensitive to her because when she would fill up with tears or fight crying he would respond to her instantly, turning his head towards her.  She never communicated with him quite the way I did, but she and Mr. Lizard, they seemed to be coming to some understandings.

She talked to him a lot. She gave him choices. He could stay inside with her. He could go outside. He could leave. He could stay. He could live. He could die. Whatever he wanted, she said, it was okay. She would help in every way possible to see it through.

 She lay her hands upon him in the hopes of healing him.

She used crystal healing methods.

She surrounded him with warmth and love.

 She was told by the Pet Store expert that she needed to keep him warm, especially while he was healing. She refused to buy a $50 heatilator lightbulb -- but she did set up a little house for him inside until the nighttime temperatures warmed up. She put him outside all day and brought him in at night.

He just stayed pretty much wherever she put him.  

She put a pillow with my photo on it beside him at night so that I could "watch over him". She didn't need to do that, I was watching over him anyway.  

She had concern from time to time about why he was back in her life. The last two times when he was with her, someone died in her family. She wondered if he was an omen or a bearer of bad news, but so far everything seemed okay.

Lizard Chapter 15: Caregiving

In the morning she went to him gently to take him and place him in the towel to take him to the path for burial, but he was still alive! So instead she took him outside when the morning sun hit the front porch and he came back to life. He puffed up, stood up, even took an eyedropper of water from her. His injured eye was swollen; the other looked almost shut. She loved and cared for him.

As the day passed he got very quiet and still again. Once again she prepared for his demise. She slept on the couch nearby and in the morning he was in the same position as he was the night before. It was Sunday. She went to lift him off the towel and, once again, very slowly, his head moved from side to side at the disturbance. He was very slow to rouse and this gave her a chance to look closely at his injured eye. She cleaned the blood off of it with sprays of water--he continued to sleep. She then saw something small and thin and straight coming out of his eye and it seemed to be an insect stinger or a cactus needle. She got her tweezers and very very delicately she grabbed the needle and pulled. He coiled around and writhed in pain for about 10 seconds and then he was totally still again. She was afraid she may have killed him.

Mr. Lizard needed all the help he could get.

She started studying up on lizards and found out he was probably a Clark's Spiny Lizard.  

Lizard Chapter 14: PAYBACK TIME

All of a sudden, Mr. Lizard took her by surprise for he jumped high up onto the right arm of her jacket. His left hand clasped the string of her hood and his other hand and feet grabbed on tight. She didn't know quite what to make of it so she she just walked into the house and sat on the couch and let him cling to her arm. Dinner was in the oven but she turned the oven off and forgot about dinner. She didn't care about anything but Mr. Lizard. 

He would still be clinging to her arm now if she could have been sitting there this long! She eventually slid her arm out of the jacket and left him on it, still clinging to the drawstring. She placed him on a flat pillow on a towel on her jacket and she proceeded to sleep on the couch next to him all night. She was sure he was dying he was so still and silent. She prepared to bury him up on the trail with my ashes the next morning, which was Saturday.

By the way I don't know much about cameras and colors but many photos of Mr. Lizard have purple clouds in them. Maybe it was just the reflection from her jacket, or maybe it was something else.

LIZARD Chapter 13: LIZARD RETURNS

One week in early March Spring broke through. The sun came out and warmed the earth and the trees. It awakened the birds and the bees. Buds started forming on branches and there were even blossoms on the peach trees. She had been healing little by little from the losses. She still had far to go. She wondered if Spring was awakening Lizard too.

It was a Friday night and she was in the mood to stay home, but she had to mail a package at the post office to go out by morning. She got into her car, drove to the post office, ran a couple more errands and returned home. As she drove up the road and approached the house she saw something light-colored on the blacktop ahead of her. "Is that what I think it is?" she asked herself. She jumped out of the car and examined what was lying on the road.  

It was Mr. Lizard. He wasn't moving. He wasn't squashed.  He hadn't been hit by a car. But he was injured somehow and had been crossing the road, heading right towards our house. He was only a few feet away from our driveway. She ran inside and got some cloths and tools.  She came back and pulled his webbed feet off the blacktop just as she had pulled them off the cinder blocks on the fireplace.

He wasn't moving at all. She studied him closely. He looked older. His scales and his body were intact but his eye looked like it had been pecked out by a bird or something. The left side of his face was caved in and had blood on it and he had blood all around the edges of his mouth. She knew enough about medical stuff that if they bleed this way they may have internal bleeding that is fatal. Her tears began to flow again. Losing him somehow brought back a lot of the pain and sadness of losing me and her father too.  

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Lizard Chapter 12: WINTER ARRIVES

Days, weeks, months passed. The winter was the hardest winter on record. She was grieving and she was healing. Time heals everything if you let it. Still, she thought of me night and day. She thought of her father a lot. She thought of Mr. Lizard often too. She thought of him as the monsoons washed the autumn away. She thought about him and worried for him with the snow and the wind and the cold. She wondered where he was living and she prayed that he was safe and somehow warm. She was glad that she believed in Heaven and the Rainbow Bridge so that she didn't worry so much about her Dad and me. She didn't understand that she didn't need to worry about Lizard either. 

Meanwhile Lizard was concerned that she was upset with him. It is hard to be God's messenger when you come to take someone away from someone who loves them. He hoped that she would forgive him because he knew that forgiveness is one of the most important things on the face of the earth.