THIS HAPPENED TODAY...

I was looking at Japanese finches in the park when something floating in the pond caught my attention. I gulped. It was the little baby turtle I'd returned to the water last week (Apr 28, 2024). I've been saddened to see hatchling corpses before, but this one tore me up even more because I'd made an extra effort to save it on land.

It was such a wee thing. I thought I could give it a dandelion puff growing around the Irrigation Ditch nearby, when I saw a lizard squirm out of hiding, seeming to say, "A dandelion seed? You can do better than that." And he showed me two small wildflowers with his tail. Okay Lizzie, one flower for you, one for me--how's that? He slithered away. Lizards don't usually show themselves.

P.S.:(I noticed last year on May 3, I posted about the Japanese Finch too. I used to think they were real cute tiny birds. Maybe this time of the year, they get so noisy you can't not notice them or something.)

FASTER THAN I THOUGHT

I really thought it would be way more than a year.

Last year, at the park, I saw a baby lizard come out of a bush; find himself face to face with a large dragonfly. I wondered what the two would do. They just looked at each other as if paralyzed--or sizing each other up, perhaps. After a long moment, the dragonfly flew off and the lizard disappeared back down into the bush as if nothing had happened.

That moment...I remember wishing then I had the ability to capture it on paper. I knew I couldn't then, and I stared hard at that place on top of the bush and burned the image in my mind so I would remember it when the time came I could draw it. In ten years' time? twenty? I didn't know.

I know I still have a long, long ways to go--my little lizard looks like a green mole!--but I thought it would be better to get it drawn poorly than to forget it completely, so...here 'tis.