Nothing scares me…well, almost nothing. Among the short list of things that do scare me, I have one misunderstood fear. Vacuums cleaners. When hearing of this fear, some have remarked, “What are you, a dog?” The truth is that I am no so much scared of vacuums as I am scared of their users. Growing up, my mother kept the house orderly and neat. She would vacuum often because she had kids and cats, 2 things that stink up a house (As a side note, I hate children, especially the sound of their laughter.) Vacuuming didn’t represent cleaning to me though; it represented a mood in the house. It was a foreboding mood. It was a tense mood similar to that of the Cuban missile crisis. It meant, watch your ass, don’t make a wrong move or you will regret it. Maybe my view of the whole thing is clouded by the haze of time, but it always seemed that when the vacuum turned on, my mother transformed from a lovely woman to a creature of horror and anger. The slightest misstep could result in the scolding of a lifetime or worse…grounding. This was before the time of the internets and computers; it was a time when being sent to your room meant that there would be absolutely no fun that day. I was deathly afraid of being sent to my room for the afternoon. I was terrified of being yelled at by the witch with the vacuum. As a result of the hair trigger that the vacuum instilled in my mother’s temper, to this day I fear the use of vacuums. Call me crazy, but that just seems normal.
Oh, and my mother is a wonderful woman.