Chapter 7 - Reclaiming the Woods
As the first anniversary of the incident approached, the anxiety in our household began to creep back in, like a low-grade fever. The woods behind our house, thick with summer growth once more, felt like a silent witness to our trauma. I noticed Maisy staring out the kitchen window at the tree line, her fingers nervously twirling a strand of her blonde hair.
"What are you thinking about, Mai?" I asked, coming up behind her and wrapping my arms around her shoulders.
"The woods look different now," she said quietly. "Last year, they felt dark and sharp. But today, they just look like trees."
"They are just trees, sweetie," I said. "And I think it's time we take them back."
That weekend, with the help of a few close friends and a local landscaping crew, we decided to transform the edge of the property. We cleared away the overgrown thorn bushes that had scratched Maisy’s arms. We trimmed the low-hanging branches that had blocked the sunlight.
In their place, we built a beautiful, vibrant community garden. We planted hydrangeas, lavender, and sweet-smelling jasmine. We built a sturdy, white wooden fence with a secure gate that required a code to open—a physical manifestation of the boundaries we had worked so hard to establish.
Inside the fence, we constructed a playground for Theo, complete with a safe, rubberized mulch floor and a double swing set.
On the day the garden was completed, Maisy and I walked out to the very edge of the property line, where the cultivated grass met the wild, untamed forest. I handed her a small trowel and a packet of wild sunflower seeds.
"Let's plant these right at the border," I suggested. "So every time we look at the woods, we see something beautiful growing."
Maisy knelt down, digging into the rich, dark soil. She dropped the seeds into the earth and covered them gently, patting the dirt down with her palms—the very same hands that had carried her brother through the darkness a year prior.
"Mommy," she said, looking up at me, her face glowing in the warm afternoon light. "I don't think I'm afraid of the dark anymore."
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"Why is that, my love?"
"Because I know that even if it gets dark, we know how to find our way back to the light."
