Possibly I had been out in the sun too long picking some fruit from the orchard at Windsong. Needing a break I came back to the house and with a cool drink set up in a lounge chair on my shaded deck. Almost immediately an old pal made her appearance. Over the years of our association of me observing her forays onto the stage of my deck, her antics always seemed to spool before my eye(s) without pause, no breaks for commercials, or final scene stage adjustments, no prima donna this gal. And so in that vein I’ll share what I observed; and how I know this … her thoughts ... I do not have a clue. So here in run-on format:
She, the lizard Long-belle, after traversing the narrow rope supporting the hammock, next traveled down onto the bundle it held suspended, and darted over onto the cool upper epidermis, dodging the stalks of black fiber erupting from the surface, curiosity satisfied she scampered back onto the comfrey leaves, applied earlier to an abrasion of the bundle’s epidermis, there she paused and sniffed the poultice’s natural composting gases, instantly she became giddy from the residual ethylene oxide absorbed by those healing fibers covering the bundle, after which she chased her tail for awhile and darted in pirouettes, and imagined herself a haughty, imperial Gila in a tutu, but abruptly she tired and curled up immobile, resting her head on what humans would recognize as a button, from her vantage she could see the other hammock bundle across the room beginning to erupt and shake, but soon lost interest when instinct instructed a frozen pause; her ogles stopped darting, and a cold eye-lock-on stare at where a hussy female mantis stood with her fat haunches on a canvas backpack a half mile away in lizard distance, then a slow bending of Long-belle’s tail, followed immediately by the two gun metal gray right legs pulled forward in conjunction with the two left legs pushing backwards; this locomotion cycle could be maintained at two-hundred and fifty-sixty repetitions a minute for up to four minutes, all the while she would maintain her sight on the hussy’s yet unchallenged presence in her domain, calculating that the challenge free status of a natural enemy permitted her return to the shelter of the earthen roof chamber; ouch … suddenly complicating matters, little grains of angular clear quartz had lodged in the skin fold between her left front leg and belly, probably picked up from her exploration of the comfrey, causing a painful abrading as she scampered up the wall, not a good day, she bent to the task of flicking them out with her tongue, then continued to her penthouse chamber; unexpectedly another reflex look, head rigid, and then firing of the puce tongue, an instrument longer than her body, darting without pause in her locomotion, to snatch a nutritious, al dente, frog flea into her mouth – dinner for two young hungry, alone at home, children awaiting their mothers return; all this as seen and from and reported from her level of observation.
That frog, another old confident who supplied the flea I mentioned, is another story I’ll share later with you all. Look, I must say and at risk of repeating myself … the level of observation will produce the phenomenon; so if you care to venture into other realms, then try looking closely at the small world around you.
