The morning began as nothing more than a neighbor’s bad habit: tires crunching over our lawn, snowman leaning a little further each day. I’d told my son to let it go, to be patient, to “use his words,” the way we’re told good parents should. But words lost against the weight of a car and the weight of an adult who assumed his path mattered more than our space.

When the tire met the hidden spike, the sound was startling, but the silence that followed was louder. My son didn’t gloat; he simply stood there, small but immovable, as if to say, “Now do you see?” That day, the lesson wasn’t neat or pretty. It was messy, human, and edged with discomfort. Yet in that fragile moment of shared apologies and traffic cones, we both discovered that sometimes justice looks like a flat tire and a child who finally refuses to move.