I’ve got a secret. It’s not a huge one. It’s not an obscure growth that will make me instaneously wealthy but slightly disgusting and it’s not some weird fetish about hirsuite men with pot bellies. (You already know about that one) It’s so much smaller than that and about as signifcant as toothpaste.
I am scared of the wind. Not the subversive fart or ungracious burp kind of wind, the wind. Like through the trees wind. Not the ‘gentle breeze from the ocean’ or even the ‘screaming wind of driving too fast with your head out of the window,’ no, not that. I mean the ‘have you tied down the outdoor furniture’ kind of wind. The ‘Cyclone Tracey is not coming, this is just the leftover of the one that hit Fiji last week’ kind of wind. The one where the windows almost rattle, the trees bend at weird angles and the leaves are so loud you could be mistaken that you’re at the beach and Posiedon got pissed about something huge.
It’s an odd thing to be scared of and it wasn’t until lying in bed last night with the fear of my house being torn apart around me and the threat of my body being flung from the third floor with as much grace as a sumo wrestler in a Dorothy style tornado, that I wondered what could possibly make other people hide beneath their sheets with the lights on at thirty-five? I know that we all have demons. I know we all hold onto things that keep us awake at night sometimes. But I’m talking about plain, old, traditional fear. Being irrationally scared of something so common that you worry if you told people they would laugh.
My list doesn’t stop at the wind. There’s heights, cockroaches, coloured ball pits, incorrect usage of apostrophes, there’s quite a few in my repertoire but none that send me to sweaty palms and under the sheets quite like a wind storm. What’s even more odd is that my irrational fear grows when home alone. Knowing that the responsibility of saving the yard furniture belongs solely to me puts my fight and flight responses into a tail spin faster than that of any Malaysian Airliner. (too soon…?)
Last night I lay clutched to the chin with blankets, sweaty palms turned in the sheets, listening to the wind rip through the large tree outside my bedroom window. I could hear every branch, leaf, twig fall to its untimely demise and hit the ground of my very tiny courtyard. Everytime I closed my eyes I imagined my washing wrapped around the line four times over and my fat girl sucker-in undies hanging across the basketball hoop of next door’s play area. And it’s then people that the real fear takes over.
It’s not the fallen chairs, the knocked over outdoor umbrella, the fallen pot plants or even the trees stripped bare that compel me to leave the sheets and face the elements. It’s the fear my shapewear will fly from the line and hang itself precariously in the face of a fourteen year old boy or his forty year old hot uncle visiting from Yemen. By the time I made it down the stairs and into the elements the worst was unconfirmed. My clothes, although tangled, were present and my underwear fully accounted for.
While the wind whipped through my hair, up my t-shirt (it was 11.30 at night – no I wasn’t wearing pants) and across my face, I couldn’t help but notice that the noise wasn’t so loud down here. That at the bottom of the tree the world stood almost untouched. The pot plants all stood in place and the outdoor furniture lay cushion-naked in a pile just where I’d left it two weeks ago. The small world of my courtyard took what the wind had offered and did nothing.
I checked the chairs and the pile up of lite’n’easy boxes and all stood still, motionless and defiant to something that sounded so scary it took me half an hour of deep contemplation to move to rescue my fat girl undies. The wind sounded scary. The leaves sounded like they were being torn from branches in minutiae screams. The tiles on the roof sounded like they were being lifted and shoved by an inconceivable force. But they weren’t. They just moved in response to the outside condition and then settled back into their job.
The wind might scare the pants literally right away from me, but the world settles back to its natural patterns as soon as it moves on. Like any outside trauma, we can only respond to the condition as it happens. Your shirt may fly up and your hair might get messy but it’s up to you to pick up your big girl pants, pick the leaves off, and put them back on. It might not have been a good idea to hang them out there in the path of the oncoming cyclone, but I did and there isn’t anything I can do about that now.
All I can do is regain what’s left of my dignity, put my pants on, and go back inside where it’s safe. It still took me a little while to fall asleep. I still thought about whether or not hanging it out in the first place was a good idea. I still beat myself up about the fact that I should’ve brought it in a long time ago but I did go out there eventually. Eventually I went out there, stood in the wind and rescued what was left of my undies and I did it all by myself. There might be a grown-up in here somewhere yet.
Image: Google. They aren’t mine. Mine aren’t that dainty. 😉
life in big frilly knickers 