Semi-Random Blog Filler

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This is a picture of "Bones Woods", a small forest that was about three blocks from my childhood home in Grafton. My friends and I called it "Bones Woods" because we literally found alot of bones, and sometimes whole skeletons, half-buried within...Once upon a time, I had three pig, four chicken, and three squirrel skulls sitting on a shelf in my bedroom...Yes, they were bleached clean, and no, I didn't worship anything creepy or evil. I mean, I ended up only 6 credits short of an Anthropology degree. That's almost fate. Of course, I changed majors in my junior year of my own free will. Or was/is it my fear of the required 400-level Anthropological Statistics class?

Alot of pig bones in that woods. Small game, too, like squirrels and rabbits...Chickens, like I mentioned, and I recall a couple of snake skeletons...There were at least a couple of small red foxes that denned in Bones Woods, and I'm guessing they were responsible for the smaller stuff...The pigs? Who knows...Maybe that's where the farmer disposed his dead animals. Maybe that's where they used to forage freely, long before my friends and I moved to town.

Bones Woods was where we used to play alot of "War"...Choose up sides and arm up with fake guns, real helmets, and our hunting camouflage, which almost all of us had, cuz hey, it's Wisconsin, and the hunting tradition was still fairly strong in the lower middle class, even out there in the fresh new suburbs of Milwaukee...We even had fairly permanent forts constructed out of fallen logs and branches...Pine cone grenades...Acorn slingshot whizbang...

We kind of outgrew that kind of PLAY by the time we hit middle school...By then we were using Bones Woods for racing our 20" bikes through and around, because Bones Woods was pretty hilly, and had alot of good, natural jumps and obstacles throughout...Good, clean boyish fun, and the only other interesting note about this is that Cory, Nick and I built our own 20" bikes, using parts we'd find/beg/buy/steal from wherever...I think it was during my 7th grade year that I had four 20" home-made bikes, one of which I "chopped" by welding two sets of front forks together, and installing a huge monkey bar (seat post) from an old Schwinn...The three of us also sold a few bikes we had built...I seem to recall $30 being the going rate...Pretty cheap, even for 1977...1978, but that bought us a hella lot of plays at the Electric Connection, the video game arcade at the newly opened Manchester Mall...

One last blather about this pic...By 1977, the cornfields along the bottom edge of this pic had already been turned into Kohl's Department and Grocery Store, and the aforementioned mall....In 1979 or 1980, Paul W. once stole a set of skateboard wheels from a hobby shop in the mall, and tried escaping through the cornfields next to Bones Woods...The Red X that you see is where he was tackled by Security, and dragged back to the store...I wasn't there, but I played alot of basketball with Paul, so you know, the story got told and retold through our high school years - in the lockerroom, at parties...

From the pic, you can see that Bones Woods and the surrounding cornfields/farm, are gone. I'm not sad about this, but it's worth a few minutes of nostalgia, I figure...Hot Poop filler, babycakes!

Hotcha! Hank