Return of the Fat Lizard

We hadn't seen the fat curly-tailed lizard on our patio for a couple of months. We thought it had left, moved on to some trendier fat-lizard location. But we were wrong. Ricky looked out the sliding door this morning and said: "There's the fat lizard."

He said it so calmly that it didn't register to me at first.

"What?" I said. "Did you say you saw the fat lizard?"

"Yes," said Ricky. "Look over there by the angled wall."

And there it was. After months of being missing, our nemesis was back. (See my post dated 9/2/13.) And it was even bigger and fatter than before! We stared, frozen in shock for a moment.

"Amy!" I yelled to our teen daughter who always has cellphone at hand. "Can you come get a picture of the fat lizard?"

But then it was gone in a flash, back into the place we had previously seen it go: the space in the bottom of the track for the accordion hurricane shutters.

"I can try to chase it out of there," Ricky said, "but then it always runs into another hole. If I chase it out, do you want to try to sweep it with a broom toward the screen door?"

I sighed. We both mulled this over for a few moments.

"Let's try to do it," I said. But Ricky was already having second thoughts.

"But it hasn't been causing any problems," Ricky said. "It hasn't been making any doodies."

"Where are the doodies?" I asked.

Ricky and I stared at each other.

"I don't want to know where the doodies are," he said.