If you want a friend, get a dog. Warren Buffet. Do you eat whale, horse, rabbit, guinea pig? What about domesticated pigs? Are animals just emotional support, Life’s guide dogs? Or should they be re-introduced where they were hunted to extinction? Whatever the case, and whichever side of the discussion you stand, animals do define our cultural, social, personal environment. Just walk in a park, and sights, sounds, movements, will be familiar and comforting – or strange and disturbing.
Lose a pet, change climate, just move house, and you feel a sensory deprivation.
You see shadows where they are none – at home, in the street or in the forest. There is something. Just out of sight. Turn slower, you may surprise it. Your hearing strains to hear something trying and failing to creep up on you. The animal and human in you both disturbed. Your intimate environment changes, and with it come unease, regret, loss. You are missing something familiar. Animalistic. Human.
No yawning cat waiting behind the kitchen window.
No squirrels running up the trees.
No cheeky gecko peaking from inside the lamp.
No bullfrog croaking in the night.
No chameleon hiding in the flowers in the living room.
Any of our homes used to be an open air zoo: a dog, pairs of cats, walls of birds. To me, on the verge of embarrassing. To my mother, Eden re-spawned. A proxy for the liveliness, movement and spontaneity of her childhood in Africa. And yet, only a proxy, the true magic of it gone. Gone the familiar presence of everyday wonder.
“How could I best make you feel it?” She would ask. Chameleons. Not in a jar, not in a cage. Chameleons in the flower pots, in the living room.
Now, picture, you sitting at the table in the living room. A chameleon is crawling up a flower. The stem is awkwardly swaying under its weight. The tongue suddenly zips out and traps a fly. The flower stops swaying. The eyes continue rolling in random twitches. 50-odd million years old prototypes dining in our living room.
Different, strange, familiar, yet unique. From tail to tongue. A childhood.
“In the garden in Panda, the row of eucalyptus is beautiful. It is next to the water drain that pours out of the house. These are very big; they lose their bark and flower. This is the domain of the chameleons.
Mum found a batch of eggs and put them to hatch in a glass bowl; and the baby chameleons did hatch, all of them. She released them in the garden of course.
But Housekeep brought one day a chameleon whose eye he had gouged out trying to catch. Mum had not intervened fast enough. The chameleon got better, at home, where he moves around freely. It took to drinking from the flower vases, when the boy from the Desclins brings Mum roses from the garden of his masters. The chameleon senses the water nearby. It feeds on live grasshoppers, caught by the pikinin, the gardener. We remove one of the long legs so that they do not fly away too fast before the chameleon catches them.
Another time, Housekeep wounded another chameleon in the belly. Its innards fell from its anus. Mum carefully massaged them back in with a bit of Vaseline.”
Rueil-Malmaison, France
Translation from the notebook of my mother
Section c) Chameleons, 2004-2009
Sharing daily 
on Facebook and Instagram.
The post Chameleons appeared first on MNOI.