It's been almost ninety years since I last saw Winifred Foster, and it will be much more before I see her again. You see, when the love of your life dies, you grieve, but yet you know in your heart that some day, when it is your time, you will see them again.
This doesn't apply to my case; I don't have a time. I am, and will always be, without my Winnie.
My entire family hasn't been the same since we had to leave her. My mother loved her like a daughter that she always dreamed of having, even when Miles and I raced around her rocking chair hundreds of years ago. She played her music maker, which let out the most beautiful melody, with longing in her eyes. That longing didn't exist when Winnie Foster was here, for there was nothing to long for. Winnie was her daughter.
We had been much more careful since Winnie was taken away from us, making sure not to get acquainted with anyone else. But people were more careless these days, and quick to subside the mere thought of someone like us Tucks – immortal.
My father, who we called Tuck, told us day by day that when it was safe, we would come back to the Foster Woods. Of course, they didn't belong to the Fosters anymore. The stock market crash in the late 1920's had caused them to loose their money, and in shame and lack of affordability, they moved. No one seemed to know where they went. Winnie and her husband were the only ones to stay, for his fortune was in his British family, and his money was hidden away safely in the bank of London. I couldn't get much information of her family besides that she had a son, who married and had a son of his own, and he married and moved to a more upper-class part of the town nearby.
The woods were exactly the same – I was told that my Winnie insisted on preserving them. The green leaves drooping like dogs' ears hung limply at the branches, and the trees bent slightly west from years of the winter wind.
"We're back," Tuck said with a hidden smile. He didn't admit it, but the Foster Woods were his favorite of our many places we'd been. It was all of ours, in fact, and because of Winnie. I have told myself to try to forget – sometimes the lost cannot be as painful when it is set aside. Miles ducked his head solemnly as we passed the lake where he had once taken his son Bo to fish. That was how we found these woods in the first place. Here, once we found the woods and the spring, we died in a sense, when we became destined to live forever. Years later, through Winnie, we lived again. And then when she left, all seemed lost.
Little did we know, what was lost was to be found again.
