On Adoption of the Hurt.

A couple days ago my mom found a lizard with a small hole (about the size of a bird's beak) on the side of it's head. It's right eye was puffed up to the size of a pencil eraser. We assumed, dead. But then as my mom looked closer, it's small rib cage jolted up and down in one harsh movement.
"We need to kill it," I said, knowing that it was going to die anyways, and hoping to spare it a few hours of pain.
"I can't," said mom, who was already making a nest in an empty flowerpot to place him in.
She scooped his skinny body onto a piece of thick cardstock and lowered him most benevolently into his death bed, a casket for the living.
As mom assured the half-dead lizard happiness and promised it would be alright, I planned it's funeral. An empty match-box might be just the right size for him. 
Hours passed and the little chameleon didn't die.
And mom smiled a sad smile, a smile that questioned whether or not it was hurting.
And so as mom went out to buy sweet-peach baby food, I sang to it.
It lived through Thursday and Friday off of baby food fed to it on a q-tip, and mom's mothering side. And today, Saturday, it lived too, so mom called a vet and they said we could take it in and they would hand it over to a wild-life rehabilitation center.
And mom smiled, a pleased smile, one that said "I knew it would live".

* * *

A while back when I used to go to work with my mom, there was an old parking lot we passed everyday. And one day in that exact parking lot a dog was dumped by its owner.
But the dog did not run away. In fact, every day we drove by the mutt would still be there, and I would press my nose against the window to try to see it better. In my eight-year old mind it was cute.
That dog waited in the parking lot for days and days and the only reason it didn't starve was because an older man would come seven days a week and place a bowl of food and water down for it. The man must've had some love for that dog because he soon developed a relationship with it. The dog catchers would try, and fail, to catch him. Only that man could get the dog to come. Only that man understood the dumped dog. And one day I realized, as I made nose-prints on the car window, the dog and the man were gone.

* * *

A Certain Kind of Eden 
by Kay Ryan

It seems like you could, but

you can’t go back and pull

the roots and runners and replant.

It’s all too deep for that.

You’ve overprized intention,

have mistaken any bent you’re given

for control. You thought you chose

the bean and chose the soil.

You even thought you abandoned

one or two gardens. But those things

keep growing where we put them—

if we put them at all.

A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.

Even the one vine that tendrils out alone

in time turns on its own impulse,

twisting back down its upward course

a strong and then a stronger rope,

the greenest saddest strongest

kind of hope.

 

* * *

"For the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you". 

Deuteronomy 31:6

"You are my refuge and my shield, and your promises are my only source of hope".

Psalm 119:114

                                                           Lizard, Bull by Hans Magden