"WHAT?!" he strained, sure I had amputated my arm or some such macabre scene.
"...It's a... spider," I replied in a small voice, shrinking away from said arachnid, slightly embarrassed at my obvious overreaction. What followed was this: the shoulders and neck relaxed, the eyes rolled, and the mouth pursed in an "I can't believe this is what the scream was about" shape. Grabbing a random shoe, the offending creature was succinctly squished and tossed, and all was well with the world.
So how did this girl, the girl who didn't cry wolf but screamed bloody murder, turn from her high-maintenance ways?
That's a good question. This is a question I pondered today as I was pulling the Creeping Charlie away from the Phlox, encountering the occasional earwig, spider, and earthworm.
I was a phobic child, afraid of most things and lacking any sense of adventure. I screamed, loudly and often. If I saw a spider, I screamed. If I stubbed my toe, I screamed. In fact, my screams became so commonplace that when my cousin ran his remote control car over my head, entangling my hair in the wheels, they assumed my screams meant that maybe I'd found an anthill. When summer came, the best punishment for me was slave garden labor. What a nightmare-- dirt, sweat, smells, and the bugs-- oh the bugs! This prima donna attitude was mine for years-- perhaps I didn't scream as often, but the phobias remained.
I don't think my maintenance factor lessened until college, when necessity forced me to be lower maintenance. One of my roommates was even worse when it came to spiders. In fact, they paralyzed her. In an ironic twist of fate, I would hear the scream, and now I would come with the random shoe to kill the offending creature. From spider-fearer to spider-killer. Would you believe, I was even the designated bug-killer on a European backpacking trip-- imagine Greek bugs! So necessity brought some change, but I also began to realize that many of the best parts of life required some blood, sweat, or... dirt, and sometimes a cocktail of all three. I suddenly realized that having a mud fight was a lot more fun that I would have imagined, and refinishing a piece of antique furniture in summer's heat was more satisfying than I could have believed. Demolishing the inside of a factory to make a new space for an inner city mission was actually fun, and hiking rugged hillsides in Italy was something I would have otherwise not experienced. What was this new feeling? It was-- gasp-- a thirst for adventure! This one-time prima donna was now traipsing across the world, enjoying midnight snow walks and mud fights, killing bugs, driving on expressways, getting her hands dirty... and loving it.
And so as I was still removing Creeping Charlie from Mom's precious perennials, I began to
realize that the key to becoming low-maintenance is realizing that there are too many experiences in life that I would miss out on if I wasn't willing to get my hands dirty, sweat a little, touch a bug, or risk a bit. The screaming banshee girl was gone, and I was glad, because I had lived. Fears conquered = life lived.
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