I’ve written about the wild life we have here on the Carolina coast, about animals I’ve never seen in Chicago, like alligators, dolphins, geckos, crabs that invade our garage (and sometimes our house), roaches water bugs palmetto bugs that are an unavoidable aspect of coastal living in the South, and even the corn snake that visited my deck chair one fine evening last summer.
This month, two days ago to be precise, a megalolizard visited our yard.
Baby-Girl and I rounded the corner of our backyard, happened upon him, and naturally, I screamed. Being neck-deep in a bee phobia, Baby-Girl screamed before she could even see what I was screaming about, and then jumped around me continuing to scream until she realized we were screaming about a megalolizard and not a small bee. When she learned the truth, she ceased her jumping and screaming, and continued on like someone who wasn’t walking right by a foot-long lizard.
The upside, however, is the fact that the megalolizard may be single-handedly able to obliterate the island’s palmetto bug population. If so, long live the megalolizard.
Other than the fact that they were taken in April, these shots have little to do with April per se; palm trees look like this all year long. But still. They’re palm trees.
We did a marsh sweep last weekend, which is like a community beach sweep, where volunteers comes together to rid the beach of litter. Except, in this case, our setting was the salt marsh. And we, in this case, didn’t mean the community; it meant my two sons.
Oh, and in this case, a few dollars may have changed hands on account of their mother got tired of looking at the whiskey bottles amid the marsh grass but didn’t really feel like getting her own self stuck in the pluff mud.
For the record, they were not my whiskey bottles; I don’t drink whiskey. But if I did, I’m reasonably confident that I wouldn’t be pitching them into the marsh. You’d be amazed at what floats in with the tides, however; my neighbors once found an old abandoned jon boat in the marsh in front their house.
Finally, April is the month of warming temperatures and lengthening days, where Baby-Girl spends long hours by the salt marsh,
hanging from bars,
watching the wildlife,
and dreaming of all that is to come.