Pave Paradise, Put Up A Storage Facility: A Gun Wielding Grandma, Rope Swings and No Rules

Send us Fan Mail When we were kids, there was a piece of undeveloped land tucked away in my neighborhood that might as well have been another county. There was a creek, a hill, woods, a field, a rope swing and a clubhouse. We rode our bikes through it, built forts, explored, swung across the creek and spent entire summers back there. My buddy Todd and I even figured out how to catch crawdads with nothing but a piece of raw bacon tied to a string. To us, it was as vast as the a big ranch. Decades later, I went looking for it. I found the land on Google Earth, drew a line around what I remembered as our wilderness. The adult me found some surprises and connected some dots. It wasn't Christopher Robin's 100 Acre Wood. But it was a big piece of undeveloped land sitting right in the middle of our neighborhood. Then I found something I never expected. I found the man who owned it. Mr. Phillips lived across the street when I was growing up. I called him and got to tell him just how much that piece of land meant to me and a whole generation of neighborhood kids. He had stories of his own. His kids played back there. He remembered the forts. He remembered the rope swing. He remembered the creek. He even confirmed that “Granny Grunt,” the mysterious old woman we were told owned the property before him, was a real person. And I got to tell him something I've carried with me for decades: I remember those woods. This week on Free Nights and Weekends, we're going back to the places where Gen X kids disappeared for the day, built their own little worlds and somehow managed to survive them. Show Sponsor Don't Just Let Memories Live On FNAW Digitize them with The Digitize Center  Angry that you don't have the latest Free Nights and Weekends Podcast gear? Fix that here!  Support the show Free Nights and Weekends on Facebook Our Website Original music provided by a few of the gentlemen of Supernal Endgame