Frozen Iguanas. Is that a new cocktail?

Or just a leaping lizard falling from the sky?

When the song, It’s Raining Men, by The Weather Girls, came out in 1982, we ladies danced to it as though it were our new national anthem. To imagine something other than men, say iguanas raining down on us, somehow doesn’t seem to have the same effect.

If you live in Florida, iguanas are practically an everyday sighting. The not-so-pretty-scaley little dinosaur makes some of us cringe. And the larger ones, green and doubly cringe-worthy that can grow to over five feet, have those others not so brave, heading fast in the opposite direction.

One day, many years ago, when I was living in my dream house in Plantation next to a lake, like some surreal scene out of a horror movie, this monster from the black lagoon came within five feet of me, then nonchalantly slithered right past as if he were a God. It took a good two minutes to pick my jaw up off the floor. Thankfully, by that time, Rodan was gone.

Beyond the shivering goosebumps, the experience also left me confused because my ex-husband and I had screened in the entire backyard area specifically to keep out critters of every denomination. Invading space that is not ours, pushing living things from their homes, is something that comes easily to us as humans. Whether it’s other people, animals, or plants.

After that, I have to say I didn’t think too much more about iguanas until I moved to my current location, a boating community on the Intracoastal where iguanas seem to breed like rabbits. It’s a mess. They turn up everywhere, in every size, and all shades of green. As roadkill, when you’re walking, driving, something that greets you when you pick up your mail or lingers nearby while you drop off the garbage.

As a person who passed that 60-mile marker a few years back and considers herself a traveled woman, a mindful woman, what lights me up like the Fourth of July is that I’m constantly reminded I know nada. Zip. The annual spectacle of frozen iguanas falling from trees when temperatures dip into the 40s was news to me. So when I heard not just one, but three very loud bangs hitting my neighbor’s car the other night, waking me from a deep sleep, I knew what it was. And come the next morning, there they were. Still. Flat on their backs, looking as if they were dead. I was told most survive, that their bodies are just temporarily paralyzed, and as soon as the weather warms up enough for their blood to thaw, off they go.

Unless, of course, a car comes along first.

Look, I have no love for these creatures. Nor they for me, I suppose. But I am not a killer. Arya Stark, The Hound, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, those people were killers. I don’t wish ill on anyone or anything. I just want to live my life in peace and if that means I have to put up with some leaping lizards dropping to the ground like flies every so often, then so be it.

I am all in.

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