Giant Lizard & Quiet Hour

Years ago, when we were visiting my parents in Grenada, we had the privilege of staying down in the guest room by the pool. This is my favourite room. It is always filled with sunlight, moonlight, or starlight. There are no glass windows, rather tall vertical wooden louvres that can be shifted to catch the sea breeze and free the view of the breaking waves on the reef below.

During the midday hours (between twelve and two-thirty or three) we had what my husband and I euphemistically referred to as Quiet Hour.

Ideally, this was the time the two of us lay down, cranked up the ceiling ventilator, and read or snoozed the time away. The children didn’t have to do the same; they were allowed to play if they wanted. But quietly! What “quietly” meant, was the level of bickering the parents momentarily determined tolerable.

When the children were older, they were allowed to play outside in the area around the pool (but not in the pool or on the pool walls, which border on a cliff) or outside the guest room where the water hose and trees were. They nearly always played in the pool area.

Once, when my daughter, Nature Girl, was about three years old, I heard her going out by herself to the front of the guest room building. It was the first time she ventured out without her older brother in tow. She played by the hose for a while and then started back to the pool area, when she let out a cry of distress.

I jumped off the bed and ran out to her, only to catch a glimpse of an iguana slipping through the poolroom louvers. Nature Girl pointed at it and said, “Wow! Big lizard!” I broke out laughing. (Mainly out of relief; for the instant she cried out I had envisioned an encounter with a centipede. I had killed two big ones in the previous days). We sat down together and talked about the difference between a cat and a tiger, or a fish and a whale, and a lizard and an iguana.

To this day though, whenever I see an iguana I think of what it must have looked like in the eyes of a small three-year-old child who thought it was a lizard.