Essay Contest Winner
ESSAY CONTEST WINNER
The Mummification of Leapy the Lizard
And the love language of science
By Karen Southall Watts
Note from the editor: This was our 2024 essay contest second place winner.
One of the ways my late father connected with us was by indulging our love of little critters. We had an elaborate aquarium setup where hundreds of mollies and swordfish lived, plus a series of cats, including one named Cedric who had his own small castle my father had built for him in the basement. Despite his decorated plywood castle, Cedric preferred to spend nights outside, where he collected mice. He would line them up on the front porch for my mother to find when she came home from work.
Once, we were allowed to bring home a huge bucket of frog eggs and hatch them. Unfortunately, we left the lid off the aquarium and hundreds of baby frogs escaped into my brother’s bedroom. Years later when we moved out of that house, we were still finding tiny, desiccated frog bodies in the cracks of the wood floors. Obviously, not all our pet experiments turned out well, which leads us to Leapy the lizard.
Leapy was an anole, which some people mistake for chameleons because they can change from green to brown, though they aren’t truly part of that family. He lived in a small, plastic cage, having been spared the huge aquarium that had seen the deaths of three iguanas. Henry I, Henry II and Henry III, all of whom, though indulged with lots of fruit-and-veggie treats, probably perished due to the lack of a heat lamp in an upstairs, suburban-Maryland bedroom. So, Leapy got smaller quarters that could be moved around.
He was green and cute, and we could not keep our little hands off of him. It should come as no surprise that this led to Leapy’s demise. The exact cause, revealed through tearful answers to adult questioning, seemed to be my little sister deciding that his red throat pouch was an injury that she needed to push back in. As yet another lizard went to the great beyond, my father looked for a way to distract us from the loss.
He told us we could mummify Leapy by following the step-by-step instructions that were, oddly enough, in the 1948 World Book Encyclopedia set my mother had inherited. Not having a source for a prime ingredient, natron, the mineral salt used by the ancients, a cough drop tin filled with Epsom salts sufficed. After a few days covered in salts, Leapy was ready for the next step. My father spray painted him gold and then mounted him on a small board he had lacquered with several layers of shiny, black paint. Then, Dad covered him with a plastic shell, making him immortal.
Just because Leapy was dead didn’t mean we stopped playing with him. He was taken to many show-and-tell days and incorporated into backyard games. Sadly, this last activity meant his golden, princely state was ended by an encounter with the lawn mower.
Many years later when I had my own children, I told them the story of Leapy the lizard. What I didn’t realize was that, when my youngest was in second grade, he retold the story at school for a Family Day activity and drew a picture to go with it. This was the first time I realized that my child was correcting his science teacher. On his class project, she had changed the word natron to nitrogen, telling my son that the first word didn’t exist. He was livid. So, on the night of the parent-teacher conference, I had to explain to his teacher that natron actually did exist and was a mineral salt, and it was, in fact, the substance used by ancient Egyptians to mummify the dead. She was not amused; nor was she amused several weeks later when my son corrected her in class because she didn’t realize that bats were mammals. Second grade was tough.
Over the years, I used the same types of strategies and science-driven activities my father had to connect with my own children. I’m sure our neighbors will never forget the archaeological dig in the yard, complete with perfectly square holes, measuring strings, and the happy accident of a long-forgotten cow bone.
Now, I’m a grandparent who routinely has to shampoo spider webs out of her hair. Recent adventures have included photographing dozens of mushrooms, fungi and insects, as well as befriending several worms and snails. Sure, I’m not as flexible as I was in my younger days, but I can still catch a toad when necessary. And, yes, it’s almost always necessary.
I was well into adulthood before I understood that my father’s unconventional parenting was the result of severe abuse and neglect. He had no memories of a happy childhood, and no example of decent parenting to guide him. He was making it up as he went along and used the part of his life where he’d found acceptance and success — science — to connect with his kids. It turns out that science can be a love language, perhaps the only one my father had. And while Leapy may not be truly immortal, his story has connected three generations of curious minds in my family.
