All had gone quiet in my life when I got bitten by a reptilian entity.
It startled me with its bite though I realised quick enough that it was terrified and had missed my good intention.
I’d needed to clean out and repair the bowl of a small fountain which sits in the garden. It’s an annual job. One thought passes seamlessly into the next as I reflect on what a beautiful gift I’d been given. The fountain is two featureless heads, facing each other and with arms around each other’s shoulders. The water rises up between them and cascades - or rather, trickles - down a corkscrew type arrangement to the pool below.
The statue-fountain was a present and sits waist high. The pool I had to provide myself. The bowl, I purchased. It was the last in the shop and there aren’t many shops out this way so I accepted a damaged bowl which had been repaired. Perhaps not the best idea but ‘Impulsive’ and ‘Work with what you’ve got’ sometimes walk by, hand in hand.
The bowl containing the water not only feeds the fountain, relying on a small pump to do so, but all the small creatures who cannot see the fountain high but come to drink from the pool below.
How were they to know that the source on which they depended had momentarily ceased to be. Well they didn’t and thus the three day repair job was perhaps eternity to them and each day I’d remove the bugs and tiny critters, who come to drink but found nothing there and looking deeper, over the edge, so they’d fallen in.
After the repair, three coats of a rubber like substance gave the inside of the pool a sturdy resilience but left it black. I wondered that for awhile and decided to use some left over cream house paint to leave it ... lighter.
Paint doesn’t take long to dry. I can watch paint dry while I wonder. It’s just enough time for me to associate fountains with wells and wells with people. And the state of repair of our individual wells and how no blame attaches to anyone who has undertaken the task of repairing their well and - in the course of that process - become unusable for however long it takes to do the job properly.
I move to manoeuver the fountain back to the pool. The exquisite and delicate moss which covers the statue- fountain is drying out and patches are fallen off but it will recover its glory.
A tiny lizard - no longer than my little finger - runs around the inside of the bowl. It has cream paint upon it - must have fallen in within the last few minutes - and its head looks up, frantic, at the impossibly high walls.
My heart goes out to it. I find a bit of wood, to serve as a plank, so that it can escape but, after looking at it awhile, it doesn’t use the plank for such obvious purpose, but uses instead the small shadow cast by the wood and sits within the shade.
It’s hot and bright white for it, in an empty pool.
A piece of paper prompts it to move but my fingers, looming large, as I gently try to move it in the right direction, frighten it yet again and it gives me the tinniest of nips from some tiny reptilian teeth.
Seizing the moment, because everything is at hand, I use the paper to lift it over the wall of the pool and it scurries away and under some mulch without backward glance.
‘It’s still covered in paint and in some shock.’ thought I and sprinkle some water over the area in which it hid and send it my apology.
The fountain is back in the pool. The bowl is holding water again. It’s quite small and needs replenishing every second day partly because the birds drink and wash and splash around and this physical pool is not fed by an inexhaustible spring.