We were that family growing up. The only ones in the entire neighborhood without a perfectly manicured lawn. Hell, I won't lie to you. We were the only family in the neighborhood who had entire strips of grass missing from our lawn. While other children rolling around in their plush, green, fairytale looking grass, my sister and I kicked dirt around while waiting for our favorite prime time shows to come on.
Alas, we were the dreaded outsiders of the neighborhood. My most fond memory of being "that family" was the stories that we would make up to tell the other children. We had this play house type structure in our back yard (and keep in mind it was a fenced in, half acre square of dirt). It was left over from these old pieces of plywood from some hurricane or another. Anyway, one summer I can remember all of the neighborhood kids trying to scare one another. Whether it was leaving spiders inside someone's shoes or claiming to have seen snakes in someone's yard we were always trying to one up one another.
My ten year old sister really stole the show though. It was myself and five other girls sleeping in a tent in the back yard. We pitched it all by ourselves, the proud girl scouts that we were. We got all of the netting up and even forced the stakes into the summer baked dirt that was our yard. Anyway, we're all sitting around having girl talk when my sister comes screaming into the tent. Her face was all messed up with fear and her eyes were as big as I had ever seen them.
It was then that she told us a harrowing tale of her journey from the house to our tent. She had passed by the abandoned play house and had heard noises. She, of course being the reckless one of the family, had decided to investigate. Upon her arrival near the play house she reported seeing a man with no teeth, a beard, and tattered clothing. She said he leered at her with the beady eyes of a vole (like a mouse, only bigger) and hissed at her like the garden snakes we'd often find during the summer. We were all up in arms, hugging one another and one girl was even praying. There, in our beloved play house, was a homeless man! Now we had all seen homeless people before, some of us had even gone as far as to give them bits of our lunch after school, but for one to be living in my own backyard! That was just amazing.
So we stuck out the rest of the night in our tent. All of us hoping that he wandered off into the night as quietly as he came. I remember one girl actually started crying. Looking back that seems a bit dramatic but it only adds to the drama of the story.
The real kicker of the entire story- is that the homeless man never existed. My little sister had made the entire thing up. Afterward, we all agreed that she had scared us the most out of anyone that summer- spiders, snakes, and all.
For our family, that night became legendary. To everyone else in the neighborhood it only made us seem infinitely weirder. Now we were the family without the plush green lawn who scared their children into thinking that homeless people lived in their childhood play houses. For us though- it was merely funny and only solidified our claim to fame.