‘Mikey’

We have a pet gecko. Well, not really a pet, per se. It’s a gecko who lives on the lanai. Not in the ‘back forty’ garden with all the plants and camouflage like the other self respecting geckos. No, this one lives behind the outdoor refrigerator (I know, a refrigerator on the lanai sounds odd, but believe me, down here it is de rigueur!)

We’ve named him Mikey. (I think, perhaps, that might be an erroneous name….) He’s been on the lanai for over a year now. We’ve opened the screen doors to let him find his way out but he hasn’t taken the hint, either that or he prefers the nice flat terrain of the concrete lanai to the rougher side of life ‘outside’. It also saves him from flying predators…not that he knows this, but still….

We think of him as a pet because, unlike the other geckos that run like hell when they see us, Mikey actually comes up closer and LOOKS at us! He cocks his little head and turns one beady eye to watch what we’re doing. During the winter months, when we had the house open, he would come right up to the threshold of the sliding doors and watch us as we sat in the living room. He never tried to get in. Never once crossed the saddle.

I worry that he won’t live very long, there’s not much to eat on a concrete lanai, but he seems to manage. There are always ants in one place or another and I guess it doesn’t take much to fill up a gecko.

Anyway…..about a month ago Mikey went missing. He didn’t come to the door anymore and we didn’t see him scurrying around anywhere. We figured his time had come and we’d find his shriveled remains somewhere on the lanai.

Then one day when Husband was neatening things up he found this:

A gecko egg! Isn’t that the most adorable thing EVER? He showed me and then carefully put it back where he found it and left it there to incubate. Sometime later we noticed a much smaller gecko running around the lanai.

I think, maybe, Mikey was really a Michelle and apparently she DID find the ‘back forty’! LOL