|
| The backyard is looking pretty nice |
For well over two years now, I haven't missed a single day of walking and/or
running at least three miles, usually a good bit more than that. Fall is my
favorite time to take long walks around the neighborhood (except maybe
sometimes when it snows). This year, we don't seem to have as many varying
colors of foliage as we sometimes do, but it's still pretty, and the
temperature is pleasant. We have woods on three sides of our lot as well as on
the far side of the street out front, so we're surrounded by nature.
Lake Lanier is a small lake just down the street from us, and I walk there
frequently. There's a smaller, adjacent body of water that we locals have
always called "The Little Lake," and beyond it, a stretch of woods between two
roads about a mile long. When I was a kid, several friends and I frequently
played among those woods (mostly as soldiers who fought against the giant
monsters that lived out there), and in my teenage years, we rode minibikes and
motorcycles on the trail that snaked through the woods.
There's still a trail back there, now used mostly by our sizable deer
population. Once in a while, I take a walk back there, and today was just the
day for it. The terrain has changed somewhat over the years; the trees are
denser and taller, but there's far less undergrowth. Back in the old days, the
ground was largely covered by tall reeds and flowering plants, which gave it a
more jungle-like appearance. During my adolescence, when I was so smitten with
the daikaiju movies of the day, like Destroy All Monsters and War of the Gargantuas, we always kept a sharp eye out for monsters, and our BB guns at the ready
(yes, they were very powerful, anti-monster BB guns).
When I was 11 or 12 years old, what I didn't count on finding back there was a stash of the most grotesque porn magazines possible—mostly about bestiality. The graphic photos and stories of animals, mostly horses and dogs, having sex with young girls were pretty traumatic. I was with a couple of young friends at the time, and I think we ended up burning them. I never had any idea which neighbor had hidden the magazines in a plastic bag in a hollow tree, but whoever it was must have been pretty sick.
When I was 11 or 12 years old, what I didn't count on finding back there was a stash of the most grotesque porn magazines possible—mostly about bestiality. The graphic photos and stories of animals, mostly horses and dogs, having sex with young girls were pretty traumatic. I was with a couple of young friends at the time, and I think we ended up burning them. I never had any idea which neighbor had hidden the magazines in a plastic bag in a hollow tree, but whoever it was must have been pretty sick.
The memories of fighting monsters in those woods are far more pleasant. And
nowadays, it's a tranquil and lovely place to engage with nature.
