They have hung paper the color of new leaves from my lowest branch, and beneath it the walking ones gather in a loose ring the way starlings gather before a cold snap, all facing inward, all making the soft rising noise they make when something small is coming.
One of them sits in the center, and she is two now, though she does not yet know it, the way a bud does not know it is two. The others bring her wrapped things, soft folded things, tiny cloths no bigger than a sparrow. I have watched this ceremony many times in my shade.
The gifts are always the same size: the size of a creature that has not yet arrived. They are preparing for someone who is not here, which is a thing I understand, because every spring I too fill with sap for leaves that have not yet opened.
She laughs and holds a cloth to her cheek. The others touch her belly with the flat of their hands, gently, the way a wind tests a branch before it decides to bend it. I have felt that same testing wind for three hundred springs.
By dusk the paper has come loose and the ring has scattered, carrying their folded cloths to houses I cannot see. She walks away slowly now, one hand beneath the weight of what is coming.
I will hold the season for her. And when the small one is old enough to run, it will run here, and press a sticky palm to my bark, and never once know that its mother stood in this exact green light, being welcomed, on the afternoon before it began.