I have been thinking a bit about the things I used to do in my back yard at my house growing up. There is not one story that completely sticks out to be written as a full memory so I will try to bullet the things that happened in my yard so I wont forget some of the fun things that happened there.

• The first big memory that happened here was the time my brother fell off of the tree in the back yard. It was very early on in living at that house, maybe a few months after we moved in. He was in a cast for a while.
• We even had a second tree pretty much in the neighbors yard next to us that we would climb around.
• If you cut through the house be hind us a bit, you can get to this small little patch of woods where we used to hang out once and a while.
• One time near our shed in the back, a kid next door threw a large rock and hit my brother in the head. He probably got a small concussion or something. My dad was so furious and he looked like he wanted to kill someone. In fact, he looked like he was going to fight the 18 year old Carl Bruckner.
• One time, when we were in middle school, my brother and I made a little 2 liter bomb type thing out of tin foil and some other blue substance, I forgot the ingredients. Basically it exploded when you shake it up. It sounded like a shotgun blast.
• My dad once had a really shitty van once. I was kind of wandering around the lawn for some reason and he started it up. It was so loud of a blast that it scared me and I ran away to the house. This was not good cause I slammed my knee right into the corner of the porch. I still have a scar today from that and was put into a small cast.
• This porch was the same porch where I kissed Michelle my neighbor and near there where she gave me a huge embarrasing hicky.
• Alot of time was spent in Middle School and High School on the basketball court.
• We used to shoot three pointeres from the porch which was very difficult
• My brother also gave me that black eye of which he wrote in this memory
• One time we were hanging out with Jason and Chad (The influential ghetto dudes we used to roll with) and we completely slam dunked the basketball rim and broke it off. We later were able to fix it, but still
• When we were really young there was a lot of sprinkler fun and squirt gun fights.
• One time I was using my Super soakers and shooting a bee hive and I got stung for the first time.
• I vividly remember trying to ride my bike for the first time in that driveway.
• My uncle Ted
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  Bio for "Ted Renne" (TheMemoryCrawler's Uncle)

  Ted Renne

  My uncle Ted had to have been one of the funniest men I knew growing up. He lived off of M59 where he took care of my cousin Steve. One of the greatest memories with him had to have been at the Golden Crown restaurant off of Woodward. He would be joking around and being an ass and this is where he taught us the ways of making a bra out of a napkin. He would also eat the extremely hot mustard sauce straight up! We also used to spend time with him sledding with Steven and also going to 313 arcade every week. This was my first uncle to ever pass away and it partially happened because of his smoking habit and Emphysema. He was a veteran of Vietnam and he was always so nice to me and Dan. Such a cool uncle! I just wish I had spent more time with him before he passed away.....

  paved our driveway for very cheap because it used to be dirt. He was soo freaking cool.
• One time in our front yard a kid went through our mail and stole a check that was written to an electric bill and tried to sign it in his name and cash it. So my mom looked up his last name off which he wrote and left across the street in a check that he failed to cash and we had the cops go to the house of the person on our street. He was very young but very stupid.
• When we were in middle school, we used to light of a lot of fireworks in this yhard. We would blow up old toys and other random objects to see how they would explode and what not. The drain pipes were especially fun as they made lots of noise. But once, a cop came by while we were lighting off a saturn rocket (25 bottle rockets all togehter). We tried lighting it, but spotted him and gladly it didnt fire because we ran away and he knew what we were doing because it was the 4th of July (in Michigan it is illegal to use fireworks). He let us off with a warning but I remember my mom seeing the cop and yelling at us probably.
• We used to have this wooden panel going across the lawn in between the ditch and the street (see photo)... many times we would run across this and try to balance going across. It was pretty sweet.
  
• And finally, of course I had to mow the lawn once a week and do all sorts of chores. It sucked and took up my time but it was a very valuable chore to help my family out.

So those are some of my memories of the front and back yards at the hendricks house. It being spring out right now reminds me of all the great times outdoors as a child growing up.