The small, the big and the scary

I tend to boast of being a village girl. And while it is true that I have grown up and lived in a village for the first 16 years of my life, I'm not what you  would call a typical village girl. Grand-parents living in a small town, parents in intellectual professions - mum a biology/chemistry teacher in the village's school (even years after moving away, I would be recognised in the village and addressed as 'Oh, you're the teacher's daughter!' - apparently, she wasn't just one of several teachers but the teacher of the village), dad a mechanical engineer, we never had any animals bar Mucki, my guinea pig, and the odd rabbit here and there nor did we own fields or other kinds of agricultural land. Of course there was a garden attached to our building (which also housed the school library and the chemistry classroom - very convenient for mum) with the usual flowers, berry bushes, cherry and pear trees, a wooden fence that separated it from the street and a brick wall between ours and the neighbouring estate.

Where am I going with this you ask? Well, what prompted it was my awesome friend D.'s Chicken Blog where she describes the root of her fear of chickens. I have a few of these unfounded animal fears as well so she told me to 'Blog about it! Do it, do it!" which is what I'm doing here. (Don't worry, J., I'm keeping the dog prompt in mind for my next post.)

With me, the objects of my fear grew. It all began with spiders. Not cute little colourful ones but those huge (in my little-child eyes) black hairy ones. In an oldish building on the countryside, they seem to be everywhere and where they were, I couldn't be. This house was simply not big and my fear not small enough for us to coexist. So whenever I encountered one of those hairy beasts in the bathroom or worse, my room, my dad had to come and dispose of it asap. I know that spiders can't bite or even 'peck out my eyes' but I was irrationally afraid of them weaving me up in a net real quick :|.

Living in a village involves the encounter with all kinds of farm animals on an if not daily so definitely regular basis. The neighbours' pigs - cute and ready to share their grist with me. The big herd of woolly sheep that marched past our house - fluffy but too scared to let me touch them. Ducks, geese, chickens - they went their way, I went mine. But the really scary creatures for me were cows. Now don't tell me cows are peaceful and wouldn't harm a fly. No, to me, cows are huge, scary, hard-hoofed and uncontrollable. On my way to school which was in the next village for the first three years of my school life, I would irregularly come across them, being herded from one pasture to another (they were, not me - just to be clear). And do you think they would walk in an orderly line? Oh no, they were all over the place, blocking my path and practically running me over. I was being polite (ok, scared out of my mind) and moved out of their way ... wayyy out of their way, down to the school garden which was at the foot of a small hill. But argh, even there, the occasional stray cow would follow, leaving me completely terrified. In my nightmares, I saw a cow climbing up the seven steps to our front door, giving me barely enough time to lock myself into the entrance hall of our house.

And the third fear was one that was instilled into us by our teachers. Our area being quite woody, there has always been the risk of rabies. Rabid foxes were, if you can believe our teachers, lurking everywhere, unusually tame and ready to bite and infect us at the drop of a hat. Since I've always had a vivid imagination, I saw foxes trying to get to me, running after me in the backyard, watching me from the street through the garden fence and threatening to dig their way through to me.

At the age of 16, we left the village and hence all the ferocious cows and sneaky foxes behind. Spiders kept being present but by then I had found a different method of dealing with them: I would go as close as I could and yell at them until they disappeared...