Woman Versus Nature

Two days ago, I sorted a pile of laundry but left it on the floor overnight. Yesterday I gathered it up to wash it, and as I threw the clothes in the machine, a small green lizard jumped out…and into the washer. For those of you who don’t live in Florida, these lizards run about 5 inches long…and run around everywhere. This one is smaller than that, so it’s probably a lizard-teen.

I promptly pulled out the clothes and tried to catch the lizard, but it hid under the agitator. I decided that I didn’t need those clothes washed all that badly, so I gave up for the day.

Today doing the laundry is more urgent. I hoped that somehow the little thing had climbed out, but when I peeked in the machine, I saw its tail sticking out from under the agitator ever so slightly. (When it jumped in the machine yesterday, its tail was a stub, so it must have regenerated it in the meantime.) I tried filling the washer with water just a little, just barely above the point where the agitator’s base fans out, hoping that it would come out from under and perch on the dry agitator as if it were a desert island. No such luck. I kept checking back ever so often. No lizard.

I figured that it either found a way out under the agitator or I was just going to have to proceed with the laundry, although I didn’t want to agitate the lizard around in clothing and suds. I mean, I have to wear these clothes. Finally, in desperation but also hoping that it really was out, I put the washer through a rinse and spin cycle. I felt like a lizard murderer, but truly, I don’t have time for the laundromat right now!

I know what you’re thinking: only a woman or a liberal would worry about this. So?

Finally I got up the guts to look in the washer, and there it was, its limp little body at the bottom of the machine. I couldn’t deal with its corpse just then, so I went back to the school work. After a while, I decided that this was silly, that I needed to get the clothes washed. So I wadded up a paper towel, determined to get rid of the evidence of my crime.

As I brushed it with the paper towel, it twitched.

I ran that little guy through five or six minutes of agitation and a ten-minute centrifuge, and it twitched.

I brushed it with the paper towel again and it ran under the agitator.

Damn!

It finally occurred to me that if I bundled the clothes back in the washer, it might climb into them again, and then I could scoop lizard and clothes out later. This is, after all, how the whole adventure started.

The dry clothes are now in the washer. Wish me luck!