Little salamander

"Hello, Little Salamander.”

Heading out the garden room door, surprise, a dark-coppery sliver of movement, as my foot swings over the threshold onto the deck.

“It’s not safe for you there, Little One.”

I’ve seen this California slender salamander before. Not quite the length of my pinky, she (or he) finds her way through the tiniest gap at the corner of the door sill, curling in a space between the door’s edge and the doorjam.

Afraid I might crush her closing the door, I crouch to coax her out of her previously safe harbor, into the pre-dawn drizzle, while I also keep an eye out for my indoor tabby who might think a bolt into the wet darkness a great adventure.

Little Salamander uncoils, places her two front feet on the decking, hesitant to step back out into the larger world.

“Me, too,” I tell her.

Feeling out of the stream of life beyond this house, this deck, this patch of land with it’s second- and third-growth redwoods lush with sword ferns and purple-backed sorrel, I've been sidelined the last several years by the necessary and sacred, yes, it feels sacred, tending to a person who is dying slowly. I don’t even try to imagine what it will be like to slip freely into some new life where you have the privilege of going whenever and wherever you please.

I rip a flap from a small, cardboard box nearby that holds sand dollars, which I keep meaning to rinse and re-home on a table.

Damp and porous, the flap is an off-ramp I offer to Little Salamander. She scuttles over it onto the deck, pauses, then scuttles back into the threshold.

I so want to hold her.

If you’ve never met a salamander like her, a bronze and earthy-speckled wonder, know that she’s shimmery and snakey, her stubby legs and feet, an after-thought. She sports just four toes, fist-like, that grip leaf litter the way the tread of a hiking boot grips a trail, a bit of tacky mucous for added traction.

Would she hold my finger and spiral into my palm? Would she feel wet or warm, slick or sticky? Would I sense her tiny, three-chambered heart beating? Would that heart beat calm or fast with fear?

“Let’s try this again, Little One.”

I place the flap before her. She grabs on and stays put, as if riding a magic carpet, as I move her through air and soft shower to a planter thick with moss and a half-shell for shelter.

Turning back, then closing the door, I lift the tall cup I’d set on the railing, drinking what’s now tepid peach tea mixed with rain.

Wet hair, wet face, wet hands, wet robe. Within the skull is a wet walnut. The mind a kind of energetic ghost, roaming through it all.

Tetrapods.

Where did that word come from? Little Salamander and I are both tetrapods, four-limbed vertebrates with some common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago.

Stepping back under an eave, the way she slithered under the shell, I think, There is only one life here. There has only ever been one life.