Ceiling Lizard Is Watching You...

I love living in the sub-tropics.

Last night I turned on the bathroom light and noticed a strange shadow. The light is a three-panel fluorescent fixture built into a drop ceiling over the sink. (Very 80s.) The shadow was about four inches long with a tail and four legs. Somehow, one of the ubiquitous mini lizards that inhabit the place had gotten itself up into the light space. (Actually, it must have come down into the fixture from the attic/crawl space, but I can't figure out how it did that, either.) These lizards are adorable. They live in the lanai room, which is half open to the world, and in the front entryway as well as all through the garden. Their main occupations are puffing out their throat sacs (which are surprisingly large and delicate for the size of the animals--transparent with a visibly red vein system), and doing herky-jerky little lizard push-ups with their front legs.

I didn't want to make a lot of noise at that hour, so I left him there overnight. This morning he was still there so I started poking at the panels covering the lights with stick end of a plunger. I pushed up one panel until it got hung up on the frame and then started bopping the one the lizard was on until he couldn't stand it any longer and jumped. It took several tries but eventually he fell through the crack and landed in a wicker soap basket on the toilet tank. From there he leapt onto a nice big round natural sponge on the side of the tub. I was able to pick up the sponge and walk out of the bathroom before he panicked. Then he ran up my arm.

He froze halfway up. I felt little lizard feet on my skin and immediately regressed to eight years old. "Cool!" I thought. "I wonder if I can keep him?"

Adult me said, "No," so I carried him on my arm very slowly to the front door where he saw daylight and jumped for it. I did notice before he left that his tail was already bobbed from some previous misadventure.

Mom, meanwhile, never noticed the lizard or his shadow, neither did she hear me banging away at the light fixture. I had to tell her about it twice and then she allowed as something like that had happened twenty years ago, too, and Dad took care of it.