Bats, rats, spiders and snakes are NEVER included in my Halloween décor because I am truly afraid of them. Witches, vampires and ghosts seem quite harmless compared to them. I am always on the lookout for the former and alert other people by pointing and shrieking in abject terror!
Yes, I know that bats are “our friends” and eat mosquitoes. As long as they out of my hair, I try to ignore them. But I lived in an old abandoned farm house that my husband and I remodeled that really had bats in the belfry or attic. They squeak and cunningly escape into living spaces where they hang from curtains and cleverly wait for me to discover them. Then I automatically go into the “flee or fight” mode, which means that I flee while screaming for my brave husband to fight with handy weapons such a hammer or tennis racket.
This has nothing to do with the vampire legends or Dracula. It is obviously a family fear because my sister Barbie once called the Preston cops to remove one from her home. Bats may be our friends, but sometimes they carry rabies, which can mean several shots in the stomach. This really did happen to a person I know. A bat was sleeping on a couch arm in a room that had been closed up for a few weeks. He sat down and put his arm on the couch, and it bit him. So, maybe the bat felt he was being attacked and bit in self defense; but the person still had to have the series of shots just in case. Lose, lose for bat and human.
This bat phobia is irrational. Nevertheless, it once prompted me to kill a perverted bat crouching behind my toilet to watch me bathing one summer night. My husband was not at home to rescue me; so I was forced to hack that bat to death with a machete. Why I just happened to have a machete handy is a story for another column!
Rats have always haunted my life. As a child, I lived equidistant from an industrial sand pile, a soy bean mill and the Root River. My house was in a rat resort. We always had cats because of this. The mill workers always put out rat poison. Some rats always ate the poison. The cats always ate the poisoned rats. We always got new cats! You see the pattern. Also, there was this movie Willard about a rat that rallied his resources and wreaked revenge on humans.
My philosophy regarding spiders is “Live and let live” unless they invade my laundry room which is in the basement or weave cobweb condos in my ceilings.
I have seen science fiction movies (I hope they were fiction) which involve enormous tarantulas or vicious, venomous black widow spiders seeking sleeping human children. I always wear shoes or slippers when I do laundry. Can you imagine squishing a centipede with your bare foot? And if a spider ventures down from his cobweb condo to explore the neighborhood and lands on my person, it is that spider’s own fault that I kill it. Recently, a friend informed me about a brown recluse spider that hides in closets and has a nasty bite. That spider could live to old age if it never crawls into one of my shoes which I now inspect with a flashlight before wearing.
I blame my fear of snakes on the Olson brothers, who were my childhood neighbors. Even before I watched Snakes on a Plane or Slither, I knew about rattlesnakes. Of course, I know that very few people are ever bitten by a rattlesnake, and there is an antidote. Still, remember the Garden of Eden? Even courageous Indiana Jones wasn’t fond of snakes. So when the Olson brothers collected baby grass snakes from down by the Root River, put them in a coffee can, and threatened me with them, I ran home like an Olympic sprinter.
Some childhood fears are difficult to overcome, but Halloween doesn’t scare me. In fact, it is one of my favorite holidays because of all the candy. Sometimes I snack on this to overcome my candy cravings!
PIZZA POPCORN
2 1/2 quarts popped popcorn
1/3 cup butter
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp salt
Place popcorn in an ungreased 13 x 9 baking pan. Melt butter in small saucepan; add remaining ingredients. Pour over popcorn and mix well. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. Yield: 2 1/2 quarts
Leave a Reply