This year I was to celebrate Mother’s Day a bit late, having opted to postpone it until my oldest daughter returned home from college.  On that day, I had to run through my normal work day and then go to my Pilates class where I am convinced that my 62-year old instructor is determined to kill each and every one of us with the routines she puts us through.  To be fair, this is an advanced level class, and I push myself to either match or exceed the efforts of the instructor with all moves.  Sometimes I succeed…sometimes not.  I swear, every time I finish her class, I feel as if I’m not the least bit in shape, despite training hard seven days a week.  And then I go downstairs to the weight room where I put in another solid hour of body building strength training.

This day was no different than any other time I finish my Pilates class.  I was torn between, feeling grateful that I had managed to survive the ordeal, and horrified at the thought that I still had another hard hour of training ahead of me—all this with already sore muscles.  I was eager to run through my routine so I could get home to a refreshingly cool shower before writing one more article prior to gathering the troops to head out to dinner.

Leaving the club where I train, I was impressed that I had managed to shave a little time off my routine.  Excellent!  Arriving at my car, something moving just behind my front driver’s tire caught my eye.  As I bent down to get a better look, I realized that it was a huge alligator lizard who had very recently lost a third of his tail, made evident by the fresh blood.  Poor thing.  It was huddled tightly in the wedge of space between the ground and my tire.  Not a good place to be should I have not seen him and backed my car out.

Now, I’m a huge bleeding heart for animals—any and all of them—especially wounded ones.  I’m one of those that would rather crash her car than drive over road kill and could never conceive of, knowingly, causing harm to an animal.  So, the thought of rolling my tire over an already injured lizard wasn’t something I was prepared to do, no matter how anxious I was to get home.