South East Portion of 352

This is 352 W. Pickard Rd. You can see where the house used to be by the yellow grass. Here are a few true stories about poor choices I made in this small part of the yard (not all the bad choices, just the ones that I'm not too embarassed to tell):

Apples in the Road
When Stephen and Harry and I were living here, very late at night we got the notion for some reason that we would pile up lots of rotting apples in this stretch of road that you can see in the picture there. At first it was just small rows of apples and when a car would drive by it would blast through them and make a terrific spray sound, sending apple bits everywhere and leaving a cloud of apple mist. Somehow after a few round things had escalated to the point where we were heaping huge piles of the old apples into the road and we would all cheer nervously when a car would crash through it like a huge snowbank. Then Bryce and Jason walked over and soon we were nesting 2 liter bottles and other doodads in the apples.
Sometimes I think back and I shutter a little. What if a motorcycle had the misfortune of driving down Pickard at that time of night? Terrible.


Migrants
One summer in college we were sitting in the living room when there was a tiny knock on the door. It was a chubby little kid with a severely lazy eye asking for cold water. When we looked out the window there was a pack of a dozen or so migrant workers eating McDonald's under that tree on the left in the picture. We gave them a bunch of cookies with the water. Somebody had brought them over to the day before and they were pretty bad but they looked awesome. We thought the folks under the tree might like them. They accepted the cookies quietly and ate none. They left all the McDonald's garbage in the yard when they went back to work.


Catnip
When I was 10 or so I rubbed catnip on the screen of the west-facing window that used to be about right in the middle of that picture up there. The cats really went crazy about the stuff and I thought it would be funny to see them smell a screen.
The next day Mom or Dad asked me what in the world I had done to the screen and I was all, 'what are you talking about?' Then I saw the screen. The cats had chewed a bowling ball sized hole in the middle of the screen and the edges were all tattered and blown out. It looked like a cannonball had been shot through it.
Now I start to relate to things more as a parent than as a kid or an independent and I think about how Mom and Dad thought about seeing something so absolutely and bizarrely destroyed. And I remember when they asked about it, they asked what I had done, not if I knew what had happened.


Birdshot
One time, also when I was about 10, in that row of pine trees on the left, I shot a bird with Dad's bb gun. I'd never shot anything and when it was just sitting there within range I went ahead and took the shot. When it flapped down to the ground my heart was pounding. Exhilaration and panic. I ran over and picked it up and a little drop of blood fell onto my shoe. It was horrible. I cried and cried in my room because I was a murderer. I'll sometimes think of that bird still once in a while, and even though I blasted plenty more in the next several years, I still feel true remorse and wonder about what that bird's life was like.