My son and husband returned from their guys’ adventure with tales of the lemur’s angry noises. They’d seen cougars, tigers, emus, alpaca, even the largest captive herd of Siberian reindeer (not to mention Santa and a bevy of elves). But it was the eruption of lemur screams that captivated them.
They returned bearing combat tales, captivated by the threat response they’d witnessed. The territorial fights. The battles for dominance. The angry displays. The rough-housing. The raw energy, erupting with almost clocklike precision after periods of calm. They returned weary, worn out from witnessing so much pure animal instinct trapped in small spaces, triggering their own duality of testosterone-based social roles and the tiny spaces within which we hold men captive. They returned home, the way warriors always have, for food and sex. (Well, not yet the sex part for my son. But soon.)
We ordered in pizza and my weary foot soldiers went off to bed early.
I stayed awake, with thoughts about their excursion to the outside world. I’d stayed home all day, preparing for a girls’ day in. I’d cleaned the house, brought out the nice serving pieces, made a lovely punch. I’d kept the home fires warm and cozy, filled with female laughter and female storytelling and female foods and female relationship tending, a chick flick and even a gift exchange. When all the glassware and serving platters were dried and put away, I had time for my own thoughts about the noisy, aggressive lemurs. I wondered what female lemurs do while their mates make a ruckus. Do the gals spend stolen moments talking about the guys? Shake their little lemur heads and roll their large lemur eyes in disbelief? Do they boast amongst themselves whose mate has the loudest call? Which handsome devil has the best stink scent? Are they relieved when their men-folk go bounding about, happy to have just a few moments to themselves?
And what about the poor emus, who live permanently just across the walkway from the lemurs? How do they handle all the racket? Do they get tense every 20 minutes or so, or do they live in a constant state of tension knowing that every calm moment will be shattered by the piercing loud screams next door?
I pondered and puttered around the house. At some point, with all of us safely home in our nest, the nest readied for tomorrow, I was finally ready for sleep.