I am not an outdoorsy person. I suppose I should have preceded that statement with the now-popular catch phrase, unpopular opinion. No matter. I am a city girl through and through. I do not love hiking (I have gone and don’t hate it, but it is not one of my go-to activities). My idea of camping is a Bed & Breakfast complete with a gourmet breakfast served looking out over a lovely scenic expanse. If you’ve ever watched the movie, Madagascar, my husband and I agree I am Melman in the scene where he comes stumbling out of the jungle with vines wrapped around his head and yells, Ahhhhh! Nature! It’s all over me! Get it off!
Friends, this is absolutely me in a nutshell. I’m not quite sure when I realized it, but if I had to guess it was probably pretty early on in my childhood and I came to terms with it pretty easily. As the city girl I am, I have but one rule—nature belongs outside. This includes all manner of creatures and critters, however small, unassuming, or (supposedly) harmless they may be. When it comes to bugs of whatever variety, I am not a fan. Forget snakes or reptiles; facing one of those likely will cause me to die on the spot.
When my husband and I lived in Lexington, Kentucky, before we had our girls, we lived in a pretty decent apartment complex in a third-floor apartment that included a small deck and a storage room outside our space in the outdoor hallway. While we used ours to store a few boxes of things we didn’t have room for in our two-bedroom place, our neighbor, on the other hand, was an amateur entomologist. His zeal for insects and arachnids was completely foreign to me. He spent weekends going to insect and reptile shows. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part? He turned his storage room on the ground floor into his own nature center replete with a menagerie of creepy crawlers, including tarantulas, at least one Madagascar hissing cockroach, and other critters I have since blocked out of my mind. That someone would collect such things and willingly handle them was beyond my ability to comprehend.
Having established my affinity with Melman as well as my strong aversion to most insects, perhaps you can imagine my response as I sat at the dining room table in front of my laptop finishing up one of these posts yesterday afternoon and caught movement out of the corner of my eye. In the millisecond it took me to focus on the blue-tailed skink scurrying across our carpeting, my feet and heartbeat were immediately raised and my mind raced with what needed to happen next. Clearly the only option was shouting loudly and repeatedly my 15 year old’s name, desperately calling her downstairs. It wasn’t until my 17 year old suggested I mention the lizard (because her sister didn’t respond immediately) that I was able to enlist her dragon-slaying services. And by dragon-slaying, I mean capturing the wee dragon and gently returning him to his natural habitat that is not my living room.
As my anxiety ran as rampant as that large dragon of a skink in my living room, my critter-loving 15 year old teenager set about tracking down his whereabouts while simultaneously reassuring me all was good when he eluded her the first couple of times. She was the epitome of grace under pressure as she circled the furniture and books, finally managing to scoop him up from in between some books propped up against one of the chairs. I know what you’re thinking—how did she manage to wrestle that oversized ferocious dragon into submission and relocate him outside? Let’s just acknowledge she has incredible powers where such things are concerned and leave it at that. All I can tell you for certain is that once she managed to wrestle him outside, life returned to normal and all was as it should be: nature outside and me inside. And my dragon slayer saver went about the rest of her day with my deep and eternal gratitude.
And they all lived happily ever after…