Before light, the little walking ones gather at the edge of the great glass field where no roots can reach, and they wait to be carried away from the ground entirely, up past where even my highest branch has ever thrown a seed.
I have felt the trembling of the sky-things for many seasons now, the low thunder that shakes loose my early leaves and startles the wrens from their sleep. The walking ones come to this bright clearing in the dark, dragging small dens on wheels behind them, and their faces have the gray slackness of frost-bitten bark.
They clutch warm cups. They stare into the little glowing leaves they carry, and they do not once look up at the sky they are so desperate to enter.
I do not understand leaving. I have stood in this soil while nineteen generations of these creatures learned to walk beneath me, carved their small names into my skin, and vanished. But I have never wished to be anywhere but here, in this exact patch of morning, feeling the first sun climb my eastern side while the western bark stays cold. To spend so much longing on being elsewhere seems, to me, a kind of hunger I was spared.
Yet I have watched enough of them to know the shape of it. Some come to this clearing weeping. Some run into another's arms as though grafting a broken limb back to the trunk. That, at least, I recognize: the ache of a thing torn away, the slow work of growing back together.
They will scatter across the sky like the whirling seeds I loose each autumn, most to soil I will never see.
I will still be standing when the light is full, dropping my long shade across the empty place where they stood, waiting, as I always wait, for the ones who come back changed.