Come with me back to my childhood for a moment, I'm going to tell you a story. Warning: there will be full nudity, but only of humans who've been magically turned to stone.

There was a woman who lived on our street who we were told hated children and was possibly crazy. Playing anywhere near her yard was strictly forbidden. She even had several “No Trespassing!” signs posted up on various trees. And if this wasn’t instantly enough to make her fascinating and irresistible to young children, add in the fact this (awesome?) woman had filled the entire densely-forested front acre of her property, leading up to her house, with about two dozen human statues.

Think huge Ancient Greek-style statues, all life size, and all… buck naked.

She might as well have posted a sign that read, “Attention All Neighborhood Children— Get Ready to Become Obsessed with my Yard, Please Sneak Around It Constantly!”

In hindsight, the infamy built up around this woman by our parents might have just been to keep us away from the bacchanalian pornucopia which was her front yard, but interestingly enough, it wasn’t the nudity that disturbed 10-yr-old-me, it was that all of her statues were alabaster white, and utterly pristine.

Unlike the crumbling statues from antiquity—that I would later see in Greece at the Parthenon, or in Italy, when visiting places like Hadrian’s Villa— that were all beautifully decrepit and ravaged by time, these all looked less like ancient relics and more like real, unsuspecting people that had simply been frozen in place by an evil, spiteful, witch. Perhaps from Narnia? (Remember, we were 10, so this was a very relevant point of reference...).

They were just going about their (nude) business, nakedly throwing a discus or whatnot, when they were forever frozen in time. Suffice to say, if they ever all magically came back to life, they’d probably be confused. And pissed.

It didn’t take us long to piece together that the homeowner was almost a certainly a bonafide witch, who was turning all these nice naked white people to stone. We would sneak through the forest around her house to try and get a glimpse— to see if any of her statues resembled people we knew before she caught us and turned us all to stone as well. We would spend our days launching complicated, covert, reconnaissance missions.

(Also, let’s be honest, the guys I palled around with probably wanted to look at naked breasts. Even if they were made of stone. There were several penises as well, but if you’ve ever seen a Greek statue, you know we would have needed binoculars, haha. But maybe as a 10-year-old boy, I wouldn’t have yet noticed anything amiss in that department…).

Fast forward many years, and I would later end up falling in love with all things Ancient GREECE and Ancient ROME. I even went and lived in ITALY for a spell. But not surprisingly, to this day, I am only interested in garden statues that are either chiseled in such a drastically stylized way, that it’s obvious that they were never human to begin with, or are just unmistakably very, very, old.

The last thing I need in my landscape is a bunch of pristine, naked, statues coming to life in my yard at night and messing with things, the way I assumed they did in our neighbor woman’s porn yard. (Unless I could teach them to catch my stupid armadillos, then I’d probably be okay with that.)

The statues from antiquity in Athens or Rome felt extremely safe to me. You get the impression that if they were going to come to life, they would have done so by now. Which is why I’m constantly on the hunt for antique statues with ample signs of age on them. They need to look like they’ve given up.

Case in point, the statue I finally found for my yard clearly has a head that’s been reattached by a previous owner. Whatever mischief she might have gotten up to in the past, she’ll think twice from now on.

Also, you’ll notice she’s wearing a sensible frock. I am not repeating our neighbor woman’s same mistake. I have no desire to constantly find sneaky children rustling through my bamboo, trying to catch a glimpse of her tiny stone breasts. They have the internet now anyway, so I’m probably safe.

This statue is a good size. If she were to magically come to life— but ended up being angry and unpleasant— I feel like she’s small enough that I could probably tranquilize and capture her relatively quickly, before she caused too much havoc; but if it turned out she was amicable, she’s large enough that I could possibly teach her to catch armadillos.

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Want to read more about women's breasts? Me neither, but HERE and HERE are two more of my stories about them anyways.