"Fear"

I looked up top 10 lists for fear and saw zombies.  Really?  How many zombies have you fended off recently?  How many spider or snake attacks?  Have you fallen off any tall buildings?  Did your plane go down?  Crazy people.  I'm kind of pleased that some of my fears about the environment and politicians have moved up on the list in the last year -- though quite displeased there are impelling reasons for those issues to move up the list.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to look at spiders either.  I just think it's unlikely one of them is going to kill me -- unlike my perfectly legitimate paranoia about ticks, which gets to the point of a lot of fears.  Ticks are foreign to me.  I'm afraid I don't know how to protect myself adequately.  The deer raiding my garden carry ticks, so it's a reasonable threat.  Ticks carry Lyme disease.  I don't want to catch that.  Kill deer.  Reverse climate change so ticks die in winter the way nature intended.  Vote all the climate change denying politicians out of office.

I'm willing to admit my tick paranoia might be a little overblown.  We don't have to kill all the deer, just the ones plaguing my neighborhood.  Give the deer birth control and napalm the places ticks lurk.  Maybe cull the herd and feed orphans venison.  I'm reasonable.  There might be a few action plans which I could buy into supporting.

The point is to actually look at our fears and figure out ways to address them.  Let's take fear of failure as an example.  If you're afraid to try something because you're afraid you'll fail, you've failed.  If you half-ass something because you're afraid, you've failed.  I understand dread of putting yourself fully into something and finding in the end that you didn't achieve what you wanted but that's the risks in achieving success.  You have to try or you certainly won't win.  Sometimes a failed effort leads to a better victory in something we didn't even know to look for before the attempt.

Okay, time for a smooth transition into ducks and fish...

Dark and gloomy lake full of ducks

The lake's spillway, which is the overflow for this human-made lake

I went to Pennsylvania this week.  It was dark and overcast.  Kids were in school.  To me, a perfect for a day trip to Linesville Spillway at Pymatuning Lake to look at carp.  This was my friend's idea.  I don't usually go out of my way to see carp, but apparently quite a few people do -- but not on my dark, overcast day.  You can see video of the reason why here.  That's a lot of fish.  They're really big too, like 3-4' long.

Close up of ugly carp mouth which was big enough to swallow your leg

We took country roads back to Ohio and stopped at the cheese factory where I bought a huge block of Swiss which I later broke up into smaller chunks and froze for later.  We ate lunch at the Amish restaurant and had comfort food.  We stopped at a produce stand where I bought pickling cukes and more.  I love this time of year for produce.  I was back home early enough to can plums, chop up peppers, and who knows what else.  It was a very nice day.  Who needs sunshine?  It just gives me migraines anyway.

I'm noticing that I like to paint apples lately, and each kind of apple has different meanings to me.  The apple above is a bit of my current painting, the part next to the post office box I showed you last week.  I've made progress on this piece and am starting to hope I'll be able to show you the finished painting soon.

"Sugar"

I looked at the candy in the grocery store and waged an internal debate with myself between love of Halloween and the perils of sugar.  I like handing out candy.  I lived for Halloween when I was a sugar-deprived child.  Today's kids get sweets all the time.  They don't appreciate it.  At the rate we're going, 1 out of 3 of them are going to end up with diabetes, partly because they eat so much processed food with sugar hidden inside.

Kids should have fun.  I picked up the candy.  I don't want to be responsible for fat, diabetic children.  I put the candy back.  I started pushing my cart forward, but not very fast.  I looked back at the candy and heard myself whimpering inside.  I thought about the leftover candy I'd get to eat and started pushing the cart away in earnest.  I don't want diabetes either.

It sucks to think about such things.  I love sugar.  I want leftover candy.  I long for cakes and pies and cookies.  I'm still whimpering inside a bit.

I don't want to come across as holier than thou about dietary health.  I'm not as fit as I should be.  I indulge in sloth and brownies, partly in continued defiance of my health freak parents.  As a child, I sulked in envy as I watched my peers eating Wonder bread sandwiches with chips and Coke.  Their peanut butter had magical preservatives and other mysterious qualities that didn't require strenuous stirring before spreading, and the luckiest kids got peanut butter with stripes of jelly already in the jar.

The peanut butter currently in my cupboard requires stirring.  I pair it with unsweetened, homemade apple butter because I like it better than jelly.  When I finally got a chance to eat Wonder bread, I choked on its unnatural cotton texture.  I see the irony.  Maybe we just can't escape our early training?

But, my early training also included my grandparents' unrestricted candy dish.  Grandma was always good for desserts, pancakes with syrup, and sprinklings of sugar on tomatoes.  Grandpa kept Vernor's ginger ale in the basement and a large container of vanilla ice cream in the freezer.  My uncle had huge metal tins of Army surplus candy.  I loved all of them, and sticky sweetness and sugar comas were part of the love.

I could give out apples at Halloween, but I remember my feelings when the neighbors down the street gave apples.  Don't get me wrong, they were really nice apples, but apples in an orchard community aren't all that special.  I didn't complain when Dad confiscated them with warnings about razor blades hidden inside.  I honestly thought Dad made that up as justification for inspecting and confiscating Halloween candy, but then the news reported on it.  How sick do you have to be to tamper with children's candy?

I have 10 days as of this writing to argue with myself about buying kids candy this year.  Sadly, I will argue with myself about it up till the 31st.  I'm pretty sure I'm the only one having this internal dialogue.  Maybe I should make caramel apples?

This apple is another bit of the painting I've been working on.  After such a long period of avoidance, I've come to love working on it.  I think I'll also love it when it's finally finished!

"Stuffed"

I have an excellent memory for certain things.  I can describe Grandma's kitchen in vivid detail.  The more I mentally step into that kitchen, the more things I'll remember, like the ceramic Donald Duck planter on the scalloped corner shelf filled with spare change.  3 kinds of Chex cereal in the white cabinet.  The shamrock and the jade tree on the window sill.  The smell of good food.  Grandpa chuckling.

Sorting apples

Since I have good recall, it's easy for me to believe I'm in control of my subconscious.  I have issues, (who doesn't?) but I know where they come from and try to deal with them accordingly.

I worked at an ice cream store when I was a teenager.  One evening I suddenly faced a boy whom I hadn't seen for a while.  He went white and stammered an apology.  "Yeah, okay.  What kind of ice cream do you want?"  I was busy and needed to keep up with orders.  I didn't know what he was apologizing for, but some part of me was sizzling.  That felt uncomfortable, so I stuffed the feelings and doubt deep inside.

Bad apple

More time went by, and I watched a tv show about teenaged violence.  I suddenly understood that apology so easily, it was like I'd never repressed getting attacked by my guy "friends" because I'd turned one of them down.  Andrew hadn't helped them, but he hadn't helped me either.  He just watched me knock a guy out and stun another while the rest piled on me until another friend came roaring to my rescue.

I wonder when there's news stories about repressed memories.  Clearly, it happens.  I lived it.  Yet, too often it seems like people are making things up, or following the misguided directions of a therapist.  I began to doubt my reclamation of this memory, so I asked witnesses if it really happened.  It did.  Drat.  I wished it was a bad dream.

But, if we know what we've experienced, we can work on it.  Refusing to think of something doesn't make it go away.  It affects our lives.  Not talking about something because it makes other people uncomfortable is trading their temporary comfort for a more permanent disability within ourselves.  Reclaiming my memory and giving myself permission to talk about it gives me power over my own life and decisions.  In a backwards way, I live more consciously now because I stuffed those memories then.

I make better friends now, and I value them.  John (and Mom) gave me organic apples from their trees.  Thanks!  I've been happily canning applesauce and gave some of it to other friends.  My brother asked for apple cupcakes, big cupcakes, like muffins at the coffee shop with crystallized sugar on top.  I threw in a couple of past prime bananas too.  I'd show you a picture, but they were ALL gone in one night.  I seriously don't know how he managed to digest that many apples without severe stomach distress.  The ladies at work suggested they'd like apple cake too.

Itsy bitsy 4 oz. single serve canning jars

I don't know if we have to experience the bad in life to appreciate the good, but I remind myself the good people in our lives make life sweet -- and the applesauce sweeter too.

This is why I have to get apples from others.
Sorry for the photo quality, it was taken through my kitchen window
and the window screen.  This is just 2 of a large flock of the varmints.

The snowman has a stuffed head.  This is another tower of cookies I made for Mrs. Fields.

"An unexamined life is not worth living." ~ Socrates