Lilly Shafor grew up chasing lizards with her older brother in their backyard.
📍 What is a ZipOde? They're five line poems based on where you live, with each number of your zip code determining the number of words in that line.
📥 Submit a poem at wlrn.org/zipodes. Chosen poems will be presented at our ZipOdes finale at Vizcaya Museums and Gardens
And once they’d catch them, their dad would pick them up and hang them on his ears.
“They want to bite you,” said Lilly, a 12-year-old from Fort Lauderdale. “So if you just put them near your ear, they'll just do it. But sometimes they don't wanna come off.”
They called those moments ‘making lizard earrings.’
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world hit a pause, Lilly turned that childhood memory into a poem.
She wrote a Zip Ode, a five-line poem format created by O, Miami and WLRN. Each line corresponds to a digit in your zip code, with the number indicating how many words should appear in that line.
Lilly’s zip code is 33304:
I hunt lizards
In my backyard
Tails fall off
Dad makes lizard earrings
“ It was just a perfect little snapshot of life in South Florida,” said Eva Shoop-Shafor, Lilly’s mother and an English professor at the University of Maryland Global, Keiser University and Everglades University.
Lilly was only about 9 years old when she wrote the poem.
“ I don't creatively write at all, but she definitely has that aptitude,” Eva Shoop-Shafor said. “So we always just try to do things where we take in sort of our surroundings and … draw and write about [them].”
She encouraged Lilly to write the Zip Ode and submitted it on her behalf.
Lilly was born in Alabama, but the family moved back to Eva Shoop-Shafor’s childhood home in Broward County when she was just one week old. They originally returned to care for Eva’s mother, who was ill at the time, but ended up staying.
“Fort Lauderdale is very different from when I grew up. It was a lot slower paced,” Eva Shoop-Shafor said. “Now we hear lots of sirens and racing cars and everything from the backyard, but it's still very comfortable and still home.”
READ MORE: 16,000 poems and counting: ZipOdes judge sees South Florida through everybody else's eyes
The family also noticed that the lizard population has changed throughout the years.
“I don't know if it's from buildings or what's sort of going on … maybe the habitat's changed a little bit,” said Lilly’s dad, Steve Shafor. “There’s probably like a quarter of the amount of lizards that [we had] over the last couple [of] years.”
He says lizards would usually appear the most during termite season since they would eat the termites.
“I caught so many when I was younger, I think they know when I'm coming now, so they just run away,” Lilly joked.
Although she doesn’t catch as many lizards anymore these days, Lilly still enjoys being outdoors — going to the pool, riding bikes and spending time with a friend who lives down the street.
Still, a few of their old lizard companions remain — one sunbathes on a metal bird sculpture in the front yard and another hides behind the couch cushions.
While the seventh-grader once dreamt of becoming a writer, her goals have since shifted.
“ I wanna be a dermatologist,” said Lilly, citing her interest in learning about skin cells and liking the show “Dr. Pimple Popper.”
The Zip Odes finale will take place on April 23 at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.
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WLRN reporter Julia Cooper contributed to this story.
