Conquering Fear

I used to have a fear of bridges.

The kind of fear that makes you close your eyes and keep 'em closed whenever you cross one. Of course, this makes it kinda difficult to drive over bridges with one's eyes closed.

It turns out there's a name for this fear. Gephyrophobia. The fear of crossing bridges.

I used to suffer from gephyrophobia every summer when we lived in Michigan. That's because my husband insisted that there was no vacation spot worth visiting if it wasn't in the Upper Peninsula. The UP, as we Michiganders like to call it. And to reach the UP, you have to cross this:

The Mackinaw Bridge, gateway to the Upper Peninsula, bisecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The stories of this bridge are plentiful. Yugos (remember that car?) have been known to blow over that bridge on windy days and sink in the frigid waters below. And winter? Ice? Don't even go there!

The bridge just goes on and on and on...

Are we over yet?

On one of our family vacations, when our oldest sons were just seven and four, we had to cross back over this bridge on a foggy day. FOG!

At the time, I considered moving to the Upper Peninsula permanently. Just sell our house remotely, by telephone, and never ever ever have to cross the bridge again.

I shut my eyes and kept them shut. Tightly shut!

And then my son, Luke, piped in from the back seat. "Dad? What would happen if the van blew off the bridge and landed in the water?"

Aaack!

That's when his younger brother chimed in.

"Yuke!" he said, because he had a funny accent at the time and that's what he called his brother. "Yuke! Don't you know that Mom's afwaid of the bwidges!"

We still laugh about this story almost fifteen years later!

But a funny thing has happened recently. I'm not nearly as afraid of crossing bridges as I once was.

Perhaps it's because I have to cross the Glass City bridge every time I visit family in Michigan.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's because we moved to a city with this skyline full of bridges at every turn!

I think I am learning to conquer my fear.

You hear that, bridges? I am not afraid of you anymore!

Eek! Okay, maybe we can just be fair weather friends.

I purchased two things last year as soon as we moved to Pittsburgh. One, this stamp set from Paper Smooches, and two, this bridge die from Memory Box. Put the two together and you've got the Pittsburgh skyline, right down to the cloud cover!

I made this card for the Anything Goes challenge at Paper Smooches! (click on the logo on the left sidebar for more info!). The city skyline stamps are, in fact, straight, but I curved them on the clear block to make it look more like the hills of Pennsylvania.

{Today's Brew: Metropolis stamp set (Paper Smooches), Memory Box bridge die, Memory Box stencil, PTI card stock and inks, Prisma markers}

Thanks for visiting the cafe today!