Garden update, feat. discussion of phobias

[melannen]

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.

Comments

[recessional]

Huh! How come? (I am just interested! Having looked them up, they do not initially strike me as a threatening plant.)

[ellen_fremedon]

I really don't know! At the time, I just thought it was self-evident, and once I outgrew the fear I never really understood it.

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.

[melannen]

Okay if they were bigger than you, that totally makes sense. I've rarely seen them over a foot tall around here, but a whole meadow of huge ones when you were wee could be terrifying.

[ellen_fremedon]

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.