Kitchen Tongs*

*Still make me twitchy.

When I lived in New Zealand (I say lived, but it was only for a month when I trained to become a yoga teacher) I very nearly severed the tip of my finger from the rest of it.  To make a rather convoluted and quite silly story very very short... I did it while helping to wash dishes left from our last dinner as a group.

With a pair of kitchen tongs.

That's right.. with a pair of dull, largely useless for cutting, exceptionally helpful for depositing large bits of foodstuffs onto plates, kitchen tongs.  I stood at the soapy sink and watched as the water turned a particularly menacing shade of pink, then dark pink, then red and thought, 'I really don't want to take my hand out of this sink.'

But I did.  And, as I avoided watching the top bit of my fleshy finger flop around, I set my mind to developing a healthy distress of kitchen tongs.

Which brings me to this morning, putting the clean dishes away, and noting with dismay a pair of tongs on the top shelf of the dishwasher.

It's funny, what sticks in your head.  I'm 31 years old.  For those 31 years, I have largely been mostly afraid of spiders, giant squid, and child birth (you can thank the Discovery Channel for all of those).  But then there are these other things- these things that haunt you, much to your chagrin, and cause you to get a little bit queasy when you least expect it.

I mean... really?  Kitchen tongs?

But then there are other things, more serious things.  I get a different kind of queasy when those other things come to mind.  Things like loss; like the memory of separation; the violence of grief.  There are other things that kick me in the chest like a prize-fighter and leave me reeling.  These are fears and nerves and terrible emotional triggers that have only developed as I've experienced them; only as I've adventured through my existence.  I suppose that's the trade off: if you're living, engaged in life, experiencing the world around you, you run the risk of 'it' crippling you.  For a second, for a lifetime, for as long as it takes to get stitches- whether those are mental or physical- you are held at something else's whim.

I can deal with spiders these days; I've not yet come face to face with a giant squid; I'm not touching the topic of child birth.

Like those, like the rest, it's all day to day- memory to memory-

Kitchen tong to kitchen tong.