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

[melannen]

I'm pretty sure the intended lesson of that story hit a wall of self-protectiveness smugness because I was The Kind Of Kid Who Didn't Watch TV so clearly the lesson was for those less-smart kids who did watch TV.

...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....

[recessional]

Turning into a potato plant. And you would notice the others (we had morning glory and yes it ate everything, but even a very lazy person could move faster than even very fast plants grow XD). People do not turn into plants unless magic is involved.

(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

[melannen]

Says you! Most of them don't take more than a day or so once they're close enough to know where you are, and I knew even then that if left to my own devices I was quite capable of sitting somewhere for an entire day or two watching doom creep closer and yet completely unable to convince myself to get up and do something about it. And once it was far enough along to be growing roots into my skin it would be TOO LATE. So I was always very careful never to sit within a day or two's growth of something twining.

(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.)