FEAR OF FLYING--THINGS part 1

There is probably a whole generation of children who were traumatized by The Wizard of Oz movie.

I was one of them. I saw that Kansas tornado sucking up Dorothy’s home and was never the same.

Funnel clouds just don’t happen where I grew up. Micro bursts, dust storms, yes. Big spinning winds, not so much. That did not stop the nightmares. I had dreams of looking out the window of our little farm house and seeing a dozen twisters headed our way. I would wake up in the night in my nest on the top bunk to find myself surrounded by little black tornados. I swatted them down with my pillow until I woke myself up.

It did not help that the grandmother that babysat me had a reproduction of “Tornado over Kansas” by John Steuart Curry hanging over her sofa. That picture still gives me the heebie jeebies.

I learned I needed to take cover in a low place in the event of a twister. So I practiced running the hundred yards to a concrete pipe that formed a bridge for a ditch. By the time I got too big to fit in that pipe I’d outgrown the worst of my dread of tornados.

By the way, lilapsophobia is the name of the phobia relating to the fear of hurricanes or tornadoes.