Fears

Several times on Facebook I have taken surveys that ask about fears, what I'm afraid of.  I've noticed that many people mention fear of flying, and while I'm not crazy about take-offs I'm not really afraid of flying.  Nor do I really fear snakes another commonly mentioned fear.  I don't like coming upon them unexpectedly but I have been known to handle them.  Spiders don't really scare me, they're just ugly.  No, what terrifies me, gives me shivers, makes me sick, causes me to break out in a cold sweat is . . . . SNAILS!  Yes it's true, I suffer from Molluscophobia, fear of snails.  

I have never touched one, I'm afraid what would happen if I did----faint, hurl, full-blown anxiety attack.

I know some people like them and some people, including my daughter, eat them, but I've gone out of my way to learn how to say snail in many languages so that I don't accidentally order them when dining in a foreign country.  German for snail is die Schnecke, caracol is Spanish, slak is Dutch, lumca is Italian and salyangoz is Turkish ( lived in Turkey and Germany so I had to be extra careful.

I remember one night at a German Gasthaus Mac said,"Don't look behind you!", which meant that of course I looked behind me.  And there was a German eating a plate of the biggest damn snails I had ever seen.  They were vineyard snails, also known as Roman snails and to say I was grossed out was an understatement.  It made me sick, the thought of all that slime!

  My daughter swears they taste like butter and garlic.  But I eat with my eyes and my eyes were seeing snails, not butter and garlic.

One time when we were camping in Southern Germany we were camped on a dairy farm and we had hordes of snails and slugs, it was so wet they thought they were in snail-heaven.  So I bought out the local commissary's supply of salt and laid a 6-inch wide trail of salt around our tent each night and I still had to thump them off the tent (I thumped from the inside) before I could get up each day.

When we moved to Southern California I was hopeful that we would not have as many snails as we had had in Augusta, GA, but alas, there were plenty of them even though we were living in a semi-desert community.  So when we decid

ed to move back to Georgia I prepared myself for the hordes of snails I knew would be living in my yard, for we had bought a house in a swampy area.  I knew they would just be sliding around all over the place, huge, ugly, slimey,  not doubt accompanied by their naked cousins,

 slugs.  I hated it, but I thought I could deal with it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that we

 have few snails here.  And the few we have more resemble tiny marine  gastropods, very unsnail like in appearance.  I work happily in my

 garden and never see them.  Saw one once on our garage door, but it was so tiny it was almost cute.  Did I really use the word cute in the same sentence where I was talking about snails?  The 2 pictures on the right are of our local snails, each being about 1/8 of an inch and Mac had to search for almost an hour to find them.

So who knows, Georgia snails might help me overcome my fear, except that I've just read that Southern Georgia needs to be on the lookout for African Snails, they've been found in Florida and the Sec. of Agriculture here in Georgi

a wants people to be on the lookout for them.  They cause serious damage to crops and can make people sick if they eat them.  And they infect plants if they slime across them.  Just want I needed a giant snail to invade my dreams.