lacking appropriate fear...

I recently learned that there is this whole sub-culture of fear that I'm completely missing. That I, as a single gal, am in far more danger every dang day then I ever realized.

It started with a sitcom. Some single chick almost choked on her dinner, alone in her apartment, and from that point on she was afraid of her single status. I assumed the whole thing was tv fun, but as I asked around it turned out that most of my girlfriends had had these same fears when they were single. Fear of death by "nobody was there to help"! It had never occurred to me to be worried about such a thing, and even after I was informed that I was missing out on this fear fun-and-frolic I couldn't find it anything other than silly.

But now I stand corrected. For today I was attacked by my garden tools. Now I know the fear.

Picture this: a lone woman standing against the world, trying to box up fabulous Christmas gifts to ship east (for remember, I wove Christmas) I go out to my storage shed looking for just the right size box for the task, and when I find it I can't drag it out of the corner. I'm tugging, I'm wrestling, and sure I'm swearing too. Wrestle, swear, tug, curse, repeat until triumphant and/or crazy...

Finally the box comes loose, and at that moment I hear a clatter over my head. So I do what you always do when you hear a clatter overhead. ("you mean you threw open the sash to see what's the matter?" Good guess, but no.) I winced. I closed my eyes, pulled my shoulders up over my ears, gritted my teeth and waited for the impact. Oh, and I probably cursed again. When I heard the wooden thud in front of me I figured the coast was clear and gave my shoulders and ears the "all clear" signal.

That was when the rake's metal end smacked me right on my crown. At this point I'm SURE I was swearing.

Once the little birdies stopped flitting in a ring around my head (apologies to Looney Tunes) I took inventory. At first it seemed like I'd escaped relatively damage-free. A bit later I felt the cold spot on my head's tippy-top and found the little hole my rake-friend had made. But all in all, nothing too terrible. More than the injury, I took away from this experience the fear. That long-overdue fear that the lack of someone else in the house was going to somehow directly correlate to my being killed by household objects or chemicals. Because I'm single I'll be killed by a bookshelf falling on me, or accidentally eating bleach, or not chewing my food completely. I didn't appreciate it before, but now I know that I've been living in a fool's paradise. Each meal I've completed without doing myself in has been a miracle and if I were smart I'd be eating nothing but soup or jello.

Now that I finally have the fear I've taken some precautions. All of the gardening equipment was, of course, chained to the storage shed wall. I sold all of my kitchen knives and donated my cleaning chemicals to Goodwill. I'll cook no more meat for meals because how can I ever be sure that I've chewed everything all the way up? Yes, what was previously a clever little lark just to see if there's someone worth hanging out with has now become an act of self-preservation. I need love to live! Literally!

Gotta go -- I gotta unravel all of my scarves. (strangulation dangers.)