Lizard in Winter.

One day last December I was out in the garage looking for something, exactly what I cannot recall. There upon a blue tarp sat a solitary lizard, poised to leap away as they often do. The garage is pretty cold, maybe 45 degrees or so and thus an unlikely habitat for the cold-blooded reptile. When it didn’t immediately scurry away I wondered if the cold weather had caused its internal engine to slow and stop.

Being a simple person of obvious intent, I just walked up and *poked* it with my finger. It just sat there — no leaping up and screeching like some freakish tiny alien. Poke, poke. Nuttin’. I made a point to come back later and remove the poor little dude from the artificial conditions under which he had clearly perished.

The Winter Lizard

The next day I go out and he is GONE. Not on the floor upside down; not wrapped in some spider’s deadly embrace; but nowhere. Vanished. Gonzo.

I subsequently read about iguanas in Florida temporarily freezing in a cold snap and falling out of trees, cold and lifeless as stones. But mirabile dictu these lizards regain life as the temperature warms, none the worse for having been frozen. I would be remiss if I failed to note that Falling Iguanas is a great name for a rock band.

So this “dying” is the reptiles way of surviving when air temperatures refuse to cooperate, a cool adaptation <the editor apologizes>.

I hope I see my winter lizard in the spring, waking like the flowers and trees to become one with the great world.