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Garden update, feat. discussion of phobias
So when I was a kid, and people asked what you were scared of, I always said "vines and climbing plants". Which, you know, even then was probably more of squick than a phobia, but I didn't have anything I was really terrified of, other than, you know, the standard stuff like "my parents dying" and "forced social interaction" and "making phone calls" and that's kind of a downer when they want you to draw a picture of it.
But you will admit that plants that move so fast you can see it happening and have little hairs that grow into things and strangle them and pull down buildings and trees and mountains. Are creepy. (Also I read a short story in Ranger Rick Magazine about a kid who watched too much television and got covered in vines that grew him into the couch, which *was* pretty authentically terrifying okay.)
I though I was mostly over it because around here you can't really go outside anywhere but manicured lawns without being okay with climbers and tendrils and runners, plus pulling down wild grapevine is actually really satisfying and you have to be willing to touch it to do that, but then yesterday I went out on the back porch and discovered that the Trail of Tears pole beans I started last week (on KUEC's rec) had come up and then grown over eight inches tall *in two days* and, friends, I am apparently still capable of being scared of climbing plants. They are bigger than the dirt I planted them in, and all the dirt is still there. SORCERY.
I had a dream last night that they had found the sticks I put aside for trellis and coiled around them and pulled them up and were waving them around stabbing people.
(Mushrooms and spiders and mice and snakes and frogs and millipedes* and worms? Adorable, I would like to pet them please. Triffids? boring and also incredibly disability-phobic. Old Man Willow? Eh, kinda creepy, but also kinda restful-sounding. Pea plants? Wisteria? Jesus fuck, dodder? RUN.)
*Millipedes, not centipedes. Centipedes aren't scary but when they move they just have an aura of "thing that should not be" about them. I teach people that you can tell the difference between centipedes and millipedes because millipedes are little hard-shelled caterpillar-like creatures, and centipedes make the human hindbrain go 'augh why all the skittery legs make it stop' and so far this has not failed me.
But you will admit that plants that move so fast you can see it happening and have little hairs that grow into things and strangle them and pull down buildings and trees and mountains. Are creepy. (Also I read a short story in Ranger Rick Magazine about a kid who watched too much television and got covered in vines that grew him into the couch, which *was* pretty authentically terrifying okay.)
I though I was mostly over it because around here you can't really go outside anywhere but manicured lawns without being okay with climbers and tendrils and runners, plus pulling down wild grapevine is actually really satisfying and you have to be willing to touch it to do that, but then yesterday I went out on the back porch and discovered that the Trail of Tears pole beans I started last week (on KUEC's rec) had come up and then grown over eight inches tall *in two days* and, friends, I am apparently still capable of being scared of climbing plants. They are bigger than the dirt I planted them in, and all the dirt is still there. SORCERY.
I had a dream last night that they had found the sticks I put aside for trellis and coiled around them and pulled them up and were waving them around stabbing people.
(Mushrooms and spiders and mice and snakes and frogs and millipedes* and worms? Adorable, I would like to pet them please. Triffids? boring and also incredibly disability-phobic. Old Man Willow? Eh, kinda creepy, but also kinda restful-sounding. Pea plants? Wisteria? Jesus fuck, dodder? RUN.)
*Millipedes, not centipedes. Centipedes aren't scary but when they move they just have an aura of "thing that should not be" about them. I teach people that you can tell the difference between centipedes and millipedes because millipedes are little hard-shelled caterpillar-like creatures, and centipedes make the human hindbrain go 'augh why all the skittery legs make it stop' and so far this has not failed me.
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Although after doing this for hours one day I saw centipedes flashing in my vision when I was trying to go to sleep at night--it was very distracting.
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Which I know is how many entomologically inclined people are about bugs. I am mostly over my childhood bug phobia -- in early teenaged years I thought "well, other people are scared of rats and snakes and stuff and that's clearly wrong, they're amazing, so I'm probably being just as irrational and unfair about bugs" and thenceforth worked very deliberately to override my AUGH BUG reaction with HELLO FELLOW LIFEFORM WHO IS WORTHY AND COOL IN YOUR OWN RIGHT. But it still lurks somewhere in my hindbrain, ready to give me a jolt of adrenaline when faced with certain kinds of large visible jointed legs, or something that jumps erratically and unpredictably. (Grasshoppers are cool and worthy lifeforms in their own right and I would like all of them to exist way the hell over there away from me thanks.)
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I have had friends who were run-and-scream phobic of bugs and tbh I am not sure how you exist like that, at least when there is ivy I pretty much know where it is, if I felt that way about spiders or stinkbugs or ants I would not be able to be in a house. Or out of doors. Just being very good at denial I guess? (I get really augh about bugs when a) I know they are there but not exactly where they are, and b) I know they might bite me and I will itch for two weeks. But that is a relatively small subset of bugs and I know most of the ones around here aren't those.)
(Except moths. Sorry Combeferre, little white moths are kinda creepy too with their nasty papery fluttery wings.)
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I've always kind of had the opposite? I think it's because of Ents. Ents were Good, and I learned about them (and them tearing down Isengard with their fingers) long before I ever learned what vines did to buildings, to the point that I remember dad explaining why English Ivy could damage buildings for the first time and me going OH OH LIKE TREEBEARD DID TO ISENGARD and fell in love with vines.
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...that said, what do you mean, it doesn't work like that. I mean, turning into a potato plant, no, but. do you live far enough north that you have never seen a poor bicycle or toy get totally immobilized because someone left it alone for two weeks in the spring somewhere that bittersweet or trumpetvine or kudzu were growing??? I already knew it would HAPPEN if I sat still too long in the wrong place, the story just gave me VIVID IMAGES of what exactly it would feel like once the roots started growing into my skin....
I like Ents a lot, and at least they are not vines, but Ents are DAMN SCARY when they are angry, that was the scariest part of LoTR by far because it was the first time in that book you really felt what it was like if something THAT POWERFUL, good or not, got angry enough to not care about restraining its power, and there were all those feral Ents that had lost the ability to do anything but brood and be angry and destroy. And I am not sure what guarantee we have that they will not get angry at us....
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(Here it's blackberries.)
See I recognized that Ents were very dangerous, but they didn't scare me. I loved Treebeard the same way that I loved Gandalf, and I knew Gandalf was dangerous too (after all, he tells us! explicitly!) and for that matter I knew my dad could be very dangerous and in fact that made me feel quite safe! because he would be dangerous at the BAD THINGS! and as far as my child-self was concerned, that was that.
I mean on the flipside I was abjectly terrified of the dark past adulthood, and I have an enduring and very frustrating to me real genuine phobia of wasps, so it's not that I was/am super brave or anything. It's just my child-brain never accepted a version of reality where Treebeard could be on a different side than me (or I could be on a different side from him) so his absolutely terrifying powers were comforting to me, rather than scary.
There are a whole lot of flaws in this logic, but I was six at the time, so. XD
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(These days that's less likely if only because my bladder won't hold out for two days anymore.)
Yeah, blackberries and raspberries and wineberries do that here too, although a little bit slower than the less woody ones, and at least they don't climb.
Ahh, see, I was a little bit older when I encountered Treebeard. Also my parents getting angry was always the Worst Thing That Could Happen (not because they ever did anything for me to be scared of, I hasten to add, but it happened very rarely because they were both fairly phlegmatic people, and because I was lucky enough that as a child, my parents being upset with me actually was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.)
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i can deal but yeah the hindbrain bit is dead on.
mostly climbing vines make me angry bc here it is mostly all english ivy all the time and i go all ranty about WHY THE FUCK DO GARDEN CENTERS NOT SELL THIS WITH A WARNING.
poison ivy creeps me out bc i am hella allergic. probably i have other, unexplored phobias, but i shall leave them unpoked for today.
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Did you know if you google "fastest growing vines" all you get is garden centers RECOMMENDING THAT PEOPLE PLANT THEM. AUGH. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT. PURE EVIL.
....we have a bunch of English ivy that I TOLD my parents not to plant but did they listen, no. And now it is eating the yard.
I do not actually know how allergic to poison ivy I am because I was taught to recognize and avoid from the time I could walk. (Possibly that contributed to the phobia....) Although apparently if you don't get exposed at all before you're an adult, the chances of ever becoming allergic are considerably less, which is interesting.
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Also I totally remember that magazine, I partly named a hamster after it ^.^
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(I dreamed about the bean plants again last night. <_<)
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Thinking back--I have very few memories at all from that age, but one that I do have is just an image of black-eyed susans and the feeling of fear that went with it. It occurs to me that the image is of the flowers seen from below--I was looking up at the flower heads, which were maybe a foot above my own eye level. The image in my head is still, but thinking now about how they move in the breeze, I can imagine that from beneath the black, bulging centers of the flowers might have looked like buzzing insects, or maybe like searching eyes. I did get over the fear on its own, pretty much around the time when I would have matched the flowers in height.
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Yeah, these were awfully big ones, probably pushing four feet. I don't think I've ever seen them that tall east of the Mississippi.
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Millipedes, though, freak me out. I'm not even sure why; I don't mind worms or snakes or other squirmy things.
ETA: Perhaps relevant is that the only centipedes I've encountered in RL are house centipedes, which are harmless, fairly small, and beneficial.
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House centipedes are the WORST they're like 90% skitter by volume. (I have no idea why centipedes, because that kind of locomotion doesn't bother me in, say, a robot that walks that way. Just centipedes. Maybe it's the skitter combined with the twitchiness combined with the speed?
..You probably don't enjoy the six-inch-long giant millipedes in the Appalachians then, huh.