By the time you’re reading this, I will know whether I survived my annual battle with our backyard shed.

My annual battle with our backyard shed is one of those rivalries that always seems to bring out the best or the worst in people.

Cards/Cubs. Yankees/Red Sox. Chiefs/Raiders. Trump/Truth.

Wait, that last one is too one-sided to be a rivalry.

My annual battle with our backyard shed dates back to 2002, our first full summer in the home in which we now live. We moved into our home in the summer of 2001. Toward the end of the move I took the leftover stuff that wouldn’t fit into our house and tossed in the shed and slammed the door a nanosecond before the leftover stuff was able to tumble out of the shed and onto the ground like clowns out of a clown car.

I didn’t think much about the backyard shed until the following April when I needed to get my lawn mower out so I could spend two hours trying to start it and two days mowing our yard.

We have a big yard.

When I opened the door for the first time since last summer, I remembered why I had to slam the door so quickly. Well, that’s not exactly true. I remembered why I had to slam the door so quickly, after all of the stuff in the shed tumbled out and knocked me to the ground.

“Oh yeah,” I said to myself. “I forgot about all that stuff.”

“Sorry to interrupt you,” myself said. “But I think I hurt my back.”

Myself can be kind of a wimp.

Over the years, my annual battle with our backyard shed would grow fiercer as we accumulated more stuff that needed to be tossed into it. Making things worse is that after a few years, the door to the shed — to use a technical term — broke.

The way the shed door broke was that it tore off from the hinges. Because I am nothing if not a handy and resourceful guy, I fixed the door by picking it up and shoving it into the door frame.

This worked. For a while.

But after a few years, the door served not so much as a door as it did a slightly ajar portal.

Thankfully, eight or nine years ago (the years are sort of a blur), my wife decided that we needed to redo our backyard. This backyard redo included the construction of an outdoor kitchen, a new patio and a new shed.

“What’s wrong with the shed we have?” I asked my wife.

“The door doesn’t work, the floor has come apart, the window is broken, and it smells like something died inside,” my wife said.

“Other than that, I mean,” I said.

So now I have a different shed with which I do battle.

“But Mike,” some of you are thinking. “Because you were given the gift of a new shed, surely you learned from the experience with your old shed and carefully stored your stuff in it so you wouldn’t have to have an annual battle. Didn’t you?”

To that, some of you are thinking that I say, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, you guys kill me.”

See, part of what happened when my wife decided to redo our backyard is that she purchased a bunch of new backyard stuff. The problem is the new backyard stuff, in order to stay new looking, needs to be stored away during the winter. And guess where it needs to be stored.

That’s right. In the shed.

So every fall, I take the backyard stuff, shove it in the shed and slam the door a nanosecond before it can come tumbling out on the ground.

It’s Friday as I’m typing this. On Saturday, I plan to battle the shed.

But first I’ll let my wife know what I’m doing. She’ll need to know where to look for my body.

A post script, if you will. The shed is clean.

For now.