“When We Were Little” Wednesday

When I was little, my biggest fears were 1)tornadoes, and 2)house fires. I don’t know what fed those fears, or how they came to plague me the way that they did, but it was a serious thing for me. I don’t know if my parents even knew how terrified I was of one of those things becoming reality in my life.

I was so scared of them, in fact, that I slept many nights with a bag of some of my most prized possessions beside my bed. Granted, as a small child, there wasn’t much to put in such a bag (no wedding pictures or anything like that), but the things I did have, I was terrified of losing. I don’t even remember now what was in the bags at different times; I’m certain it changed from time to time. Whenever severe weather threatened our area, though, out came the bag when bedtime came.

I had repeated nightmares of tornadoes. In the most common one, I was standing in the back yard at my parents’ house with everyone I knew facing me. Behind them, approaching at a great speed, was a huge, black tornado. I couldn’t tell them what was coming, and even once I got the words out, they were garbled and no one understood or believed me. I was completely unable to save the people closest to me. In another dream, both the tornado and house fire nightmares came together in one horrific scene.

These two things still scare me. I am convinced that this is part of why I am so compulsive about turning electrical things off when I am leaving the house (I go back inside and check an average of 3 or 4 times every time I go somewhere), and why it means so much to me that we have the weather call service here in our area. Peace of mind is priceless, regardless of the fear or how the fear came to be.