Childhood Fears

    My sister as a child was afraid of many things. Probably as a result of a vivid imagination, but no one ever explored then the reasons.
    My father kept his violin behind the couch, enclosed in its black case. She thought the three silver rivets on one side of the case looked like a face, a scary face and she wouldn't go near it. The old barn behind our "house on the hill" was where our father stored the old tires from his automobiles. To my sister, they loomed dark and large and ominous, and she was afraid of them. I have a memory of our father placing me on top of a tire and giving me a ride on it in an attempt to allay her fear. I don't know if that helped her, but I was thrilled at the attention.
   When our family drove "over home"to our grandmother's house, we would drive by way of the reservoir from the house we lived in near there. We kids would be in the back seat of the big car, of course unrestrained in any fashion. When we approached the brick building on the bank of the reservoir, my sister would start to worry: her eyes would  tear up and she'd say  she hated it because it scared her.  And soon after that the trip crossed an old silver bridge which then had a structure across the top. She would drop down to the floorboards of the car because she was afraid the bridge would strike her head. I remember not understanding her fear, but accepting it as part of her nature. That's what young children do.
    Later on, and into her young adult years, she developed a deathly fear of wind. We shared a bedroom then and she would sometimes wake up screaming and crying when the sound of wind would enter her dreams.  And the same became true for fire. At night time, she would be terrified by the thought of fire.  I suppose, looking back, that the specters of fire and wind could have been based on true-life  events which caused a sense of  real but transient terror. I can think of a few such incidents, but  she lived with the fear for much of her young life.
    Our brother, for reasons unknown to us, was afraid of thunderstorms. He did not exhibit mere nervousness at an impending storm: he would hide away. He would disappear into either the downstairs closet, huddled in the back with the door shut, or he would go to his bed,  cover himself completely up by all the available blankets, only to emerge, all sweaty and blurry-eyed, when the storm was over.
    I, as a child, had only one fear of natural events, and I never told anyone or expressed my fear in any demonstrable way: at night when I heard the sound of an airplane flying overhead, I would feel sick to my stomach with the fear we were going to be bombed. Attributable, no doubt, to the early years of  air raid siren tests,and sheer terror from the blackouts when all the lights in the house had to be extinguished and we had to stay away from windows. In case the Japanese forces were targeting  a rural area with minimal population. War is hell, you know.