Spooks

Every summer evening the spooks come out on my back porch. They are hard to see in the yellow porch light, flattened as they are against the woodwork, even harder to see against the light colored brick. They cling to the wall or the ceiling and almost never move, and then suddenly. They are Mediterranean geckos, a feral species in this part of the country. I like them, but at first they were a little spooky. They are pale tan with splotches of darker tan, and their eyes look almost blue, so dark under such thin skin. Their little hands hold on, splayed out flat on the wood. For a long time I thought they were completely silent. But once or twice I have heard a tiny hissing when some miniature dispute over bug-stalking territory developed.
In the daytime they're gone, hiding from the sunlight behind the wood trim in the eaves, or maybe in a neglected basket of leaves. In the winter they vanish into the shed, the woodpiles, the soffitts, the garage. I know that summer is on the way when moths flutter around the porch light and the spooks materialize.
They make me remember the chameleons that lived near -- and sometimes in -- our apartment in Tallahassee when we were newlyweds. They were anoles, and they truly could change color from brown to bright green. I learned that they actually reponded to the saturation of the color around them, not the shade itself. So on a mottled bush, they'd turn mottled brownish green. On a dark solid surface, solid brown. On a bright green surface, solid green. On a bright red enameled surface of a hibachi turned upside down, likewise solid green! Those were the seventies, when the LOVE poster in bright red and green was everywhere. The anole on the hibachi produced the same visual vibration. Too bright to look at head on!
Another thing I liked about the anoles: their threat display / territorial display consisted of a series of bright green pushups followed by throwing back the head and puffing out a bright red throat sac, as if the lizard had swallowed a dime lengthwise. Push, push, push, PUFF! Push, push, push, PUFF!
I'm grateful for silent wall lizards: they consume mosquitoes. I was especially grateful to see them when we spent a week or so in Haiti on a mission trip once. Every room had its lizard or two, patrolling the malaria beat. Spooks, maybe angels, unseen almost, usually unnoticed, doing their appointed work in the corners of our busy lives.