There is a small heavy cup at the roots of the wide plastic slab where the two of them sit each morning, and it is the same warm brown as the underside of my bark after rain. Steam lifts off it the way mist lifts off my leaves at first light, and the young one wraps both hands around it and does not drink for a long while, just holds it, the way a sparrow holds still against cold before the sun reaches the branch.
I have watched this cup arrive many mornings now, one full turning of the leaves and most of another. In summer she held it loosely, sipped, set it down, laughed, hurried off. This colder season she holds it longer. She does not laugh as much. She looks into it as though something might be waiting at the bottom, and I know that look; the roots know it too, the way water pools deep in a dry year and you learn to draw on what is stored.
The other chair has been empty since the leaves turned. She fills two cups anyway, some mornings, and the second one goes cold in the wind and she pours it out at my base, and the dark bitter water sinks past the beetles and the old fallen acorns down to where I drink.
I cannot understand where the walking ones go, or why they cannot simply stay and let the light move across them. But I have taken in colder things than her small daily grief, and turned them, slowly, into new wood. She will not sit here forever. The cup will be washed and set on a shelf and forgotten by hands not yet born.
I will still be drinking her cold mornings, ring by patient ring, long after she has learned to laugh again somewhere I will never see.