Back when I lived out in the country with my mom, I was around eleven years old and I would ride my bike to my cousin's house, which was about three miles down the road from my house. There was a sharp bend in the road, locally known as Dead-man's turn & then after that, there was a hill, so steep I had to get off & push my bike up it. The steep hill wasn't the worst part of the trip. The worst part was right after the hill was Mrs. Crow's driveway. Her dogs would bolt down her long drive aggressively barking, just to chase me & snap at my feet while I tried to pedal away as quickly as I could. Sometimes, they would even be waiting in the ditch for me to come by giving me a bigger scare than usual.
What made me hate it the most was that most of the time, Mrs. Crow would be on her porch or out in her yard & would just watch. She'd never call off her dogs, ignoring my screams or maybe enjoying them, I swear I heard her laugh a few times. Doesn't matter, I'm getting away from the point of telling you this story, I'm kinda bad at rambling, but I'll try my best to stay on point so, back on track. After the dog chase was done, there was only about half a mile left until my cousin's driveway. If you could call it a driveway. It leaned more towards being a road itself because the house was sat nearly a mile back from the main road. Now you got the idea of how far away our houses were from each other & how terrible the trip was for me. You may be asking why I didn't just have my mom drive me? Well, it was quite simple in my mind. She was more likely to say yes I could go if she didn't have to be bothered with taking me there. Also, she might not have let me hang out there if she'd found out we were largely unsupervised. I couldn't tell you where his parents were most of the time because, honestly, I didn't care. The only rule of his house was to stay out of his parents' bedroom when they weren't there & when they were we just had to stay in his bedroom or go outside to play.
We were dorks, so inside we'd mostly play video games together or draw up on our characters & talk about their stories & adventures. Our outside games mostly consisted of us pretending we were in the video games we played. Kingdom Hearts was our go-to outside adventure. We utilized it's concept of visiting other worlds & inserting it's characters into already existing stories & just added in our favorite video games as different worlds. Me being older landed me the role of Riku & my cousin, who was almost 3 years younger, got to be Sora. If we could convince his older sister, but still my younger cousin by a year, to play with us, she would do the role of every female character involved. Her being there when I was over was usually about 50/50 because she'd often go to her friends' houses.
This one particular time while I was there to spend the night, my cousin Brandon asked if I wanted to go exploring out in the woods to see a Witch's hut that his sister Amy had told him her, & her friends had found a few days ago. Honestly, that seemed a little scary to me, but with me being the elder cousin, I couldn't show fear. I told him, "Heck yeah! That sounds like fun!" So we gathered up our trusty BB guns & machetes to defend ourselves from anything we may encounter in the woods behind his house.
The thick treeline of the woods was about a hundred feet away from the fence of his backyard. We found the only opening in the foliage being a trail probably made by cattle passing through. To kids, it looked like a tunnel cut out just for us. The path wound absurdly, so it was clearly not made by any sober person. We joyfully followed it, cutting at branches that hung low enough in the path & fighting off our imaginary enemies along the way. I can't say exactly how long that part of the path was before the clearing. Time & distance get deluded when you're having fun. If I had to take a guess, I'd say it was thirty to forty-five minutes of walking & giggling together when we came to the big clearing. We both marked it as odd because this huge clearing in the woods made quite literally a perfect circle, which was about 50 feet in diameter. Another oddity of it was that the grass was only about ankle high all through it, which was strange because of the time of year. Without being maintained, it should have been much higher.
