When we had our first baby, we were living in a cramped apartment in the inner-city. There were no playgrounds no parks nearby; directly below our flat was a sprawling carpark, lined with tarred roads and hemmed by wired fences. The year before, someone living a floor below us got busted by the police for possessing firearms. That year itself, two shootings had occured just a block away , one at a cafe and the other at neighourhood mechanic’s garage. Not exactly an ideal place to explore wildlife right? Yet, explore we did, though not in the conventional way.
Part of the blessings of living in those quarters was that we’d have ’wildlife’ right inside of our apartment. There were lizards creeping on our walls. The occasional roach scuttered across our kitchen floor at night.This we steered clear of. Bugs paid us daily visits. Best of all, we had spiders in our bathrooms and webs along the walls of the stairs leading up to our place.
These creepy crawlies made our home into a mini zoo. Joy and I would spend hours talking about them and observing their habits. She gave them names,said goodbye to them when they were gone and bade them ’hello’ when they returned. When we found a dead one, we’d whip out our magnifying glass , and then Joy would wonder where its life had gone.
We’d take out torches at night and go on a night hunt in our apartment itself. I’d turn off the lights and showtime started. We’d squat under bathroom sinks and peek at the spiders snug in their gossamer webs and then try to beat each other at spotting the first lizard. Sometimes we’d tell stories under covers -with our torches on- espeecially on rainy nights. At other times, we’d do shadow puppets with a table lamp beaming its light against the wall. Sometimes a lizard or two might join in and feast on the perpetual supply of mosquitoes.
Once I found a centipede creeping steadily across our bedroom floor. Twice I found them in our bathrooms in the middle of the night. These I kept Joy away from.
I suppose that’s how it began for us. Looking at what there was, and then looking again to see
things differently. Is that science? I don’t know. But it sure makes living fun and meaningful.
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