It's Halloween today and I can imagine that many people across the US certainly don't want or need anything else to scare them. Real life is scary enough as it is. And then I'm thinking of all the poor little kids who have the costume and the Trick and Treat pail and nowhere to go. Mother Nature can certainly disrupt our frail human plans, can't it?
But because it is Halloween I'm thinking about what I'm scared of. Mostly it's silly things, primeval things like the dark and spiders. I don't know why I'm scared of the dark but I still have to sleep with my door open a crack and light coming in from the hall. When I'm in a hotel room I have to open the drapes enough to see around the room.
And spiders...i know they are good and helpful and I shouldn't be scared, but I am. Of course there were a couple of times when I should have been scared like the time I carried out a big spider in a glass with just a sheet of paper between me and it and discovered from the photo we took that it was a brown recluse. And once in Australia I went to the bathroom at a national park, closed the door and a huge, large, very, very big Huntsman spider, about 4 inches across and hairy, crawled and sat on top of the door. I had visions of it dropping onto my hand if I tried to open the door but didn't want to spend the rest of my life in a restroom. My heart was certainly beating fast as I pulled that door open, inch by inch, then ran for my life, convinced that the spider was sitting on my shoulder laughing....
A writer's imagination is sometimes dangerous. It is prone to embellishing reality and presenting a worst-case scenario. Oh, and I'm scared of moths. But not snakes or sharks. I have swum with baracudas. I have stood on narrow mountain ledges. Makes no sense. How about you. What scares you most?
