I will love the light for it shows me the way.
Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.
~Og Mandino
This weekend we watched Ratatouille. Fun. Well-written, well-crafted. Almost forgot for a moment that it WAS A MOVIE ABOUT A RAT. Almost.
The night before the movie I had a run-in with an ROUSS (Rodent of Unusual Size) on my front porch. Thinking it was just a charming little raccoon that was fiddling with the garbage bag that I'd inadvertently left on the stoop, I peeked out the trough the screen door to the see the little critter. Instead I found a fully-opened (previously knotted shut) grocery bag with a ginormous skin tail and hindquarters hanging out of it. Not a rat, it was just a few times worse: a POSSUM. Ugh.
What followed, for me, was part panic attack, part meltdown. I wish I could understand why I react the way I do to such creatures. But it was like the whole universe had suddenly gone dark and sucked me into a whole and the only thing that was in that hole with me was my nemesis Mr. ROUSS. And he was in attack mode.
I mean, I knew that the possum was on one side of that screen door and I was on the other. I knew I had my John and two kitties between me and the ROUSS. I knew that the varmint was way more interested in my trash than in me. But for about 3 minutes all of those rational thoughts were gone and all I could hardly breathe, much less be rational about the fact that on the porch, where I had been standing just a few moments before when I walked home (in the dark) from my neighbor's home, was a RODENT. And I just wasn't sure that I would ever be able to exit my house or live a normal life. Because RODENTS exist in this world and I would never escape from them again.
Deep breath. Sigh.
So I went to see the ratflick anyways and I was mostly okay. My breath got a little shallow when the colony exploded out of the farmhouse ceiling. But other than that the RAT-ness of the film was abstracted and cute enough for me that I was a-ok.
Hmmmmm.....but Ellycat has been spending a lot of time with me out of doors ever since.
PS: Still haven't forgiven Pixar for naming the rat "Remy".....
3 comments:
I LOVE the colors of these flowers! Beautiful!
Does it help you to know that a possum is not a rodent but a marsupial? Or that possums are not typically aggressive to humans?
No the marsupial thing doesn't help because they look just too much like rats. I didn't used to be scared of mice/rats/rodents. I don't know why this fear appeared in my life about 20 years ago??? And even though I know the rodents don't care one whit about me, I just have this irrational fear of them touching me or coming towards me. It's a phobia. A totally senseless fear as I've never (to my knowledge) had a rat interaction to cause the fear. FWIW, I have several relatives/ancestors with the same fear so I have wondered if it's genetic?
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