Downhill

Chapter 6

I walked through the woods that I was so familiar with. I remembered walking through here almost every day since I was old enough to go out on my own, which was around the age of four. It was just a few months before Rosanna was born, and I enjoyed the time I had alone.

I would go into the forest and pretend I was venturing on some great quest. I'd hop from log to log, splash in the stream, and climb to the top of the tallest trees.

Once I went to kindergarten, I started going in the woods after school everyday with my friends. I remembered one day when we were seven, my friend Jane and I dared Brooke to climb to the top of the tallest tree that all of us had been too scared to climb. She did it, but she fell. We were very scared, but it turns out she just bruised her knee and elbows.

We would even go out there during the night sometimes to look at all the stars and tell stories. That may have been where Katie's interest in astronomy came from. Eventually the stories would change from nice and funny to scary. None of us were very scared by them except for another friend named Erin. She was trustworthy and funny and she always pretended she was the bravest one in the group, but in reality, she was a scaredy cat. She was the most fun to prank, and we all took advantage of that opportunity. We were all rather devious kids.

Even though some of those friends moved away, I'd never lost touch with any of them until everything started changing just a few months ago.

When Rosanna got old enough to walk, my parents would make me take her to the woods with me. I didn't really want to at first, but then I realized she was very good at being the "damsel in distress" in the games that I played where I pretended to valiantly save her, because she was too young to object.

But then one day I guess I went a little too far and put her on a rock in one of the swiftest and most dangerous parts of the stream and tried to rescue her from there. My parents found out and I got in trouble. They told me I couldn't play games like that with Rosie anymore.

Soon, she got older, though. We would play games together and pretend we were sword fighting with sticks. I even brought her along when I was with my friends sometimes.

All these memories came flooding back to me as I walked through the woods. They were dark, and the clouds covered the moon and stars. There was the old rock I used to love to climb. The tree Brooke fell out of. And there was the tree we'd set up a sort of camp in. It was still there. It had a slab of wood for putting sleeping bags on, and a bucket attached to a rope so that we could move things in between the ground and the tree. We even used to build up huge piles of leaves to jump into from the tree.

I walked past all of this and tried to keep the tears from flowing. It was hard. I tried to have hope, telling myself I might be coming back to this one day soon if things turned out well. But I still doubted it.