One morning the walking ones came before the light did, which is the wrong order, and stood pressed together outside a lit box of a building, breathing steam into the cold dark like a herd waiting out a frost. I have known frost. I have thickened my rings against it for four hundred winters.
But these did not wait the way frost is waited out, quietly, letting the season pass through you. They pushed. When the doors of the box opened they poured in the way meltwater pours off my roots in the thaw, all at once, some falling, some carried, a small human dropped and retrieved and dropped again in the current.
I do not understand what was inside. Something they needed so badly that they left their warm dens in the dark to fight for it. I thought: the fruit must be failing this year, they are storing against a hunger I cannot see. But they came out carrying flat bright boxes, not food, and drove away, and by the time the sun cleared my highest branch the lot was empty again, only a few bags tumbling across the pavement in the wind like leaves I did not grow.
I have watched them do this each year now, in the coldest dark, this brief violent harvest of nothing I can name. And I have watched the same ones grow slow and grey and stop coming. The saplings who fell in the doorway this morning will be the grey ones soon enough. They do not know how little time they are spending. They spent an hour of it here, shivering, shoving, for a box.
I will drop my leaves. I will hold my ground.
The lot will fill and empty and fill, and I will still be counting mornings when the last of them has gone to root.