A little box beside the mouth of the burrow the walking ones have built, and it sings when they wish to be let inside their own shelter. Strange, that they must ask. I have never once had to knock on the morning to be let into the light; it comes, or it does not, and I take what falls through my leaves.
But I have loved the sound of that box across many summers. A child pressed it once and ran, giggling, into the ivy at my roots, and the box sang to no one, and the door opened to no one, and the child pressed her small hand over her mouth to keep the laughter in. She was perhaps seven rings tall. I gave her shade the whole of that season.
She grew. She pressed the box with a boy beside her, both of them still and terrified, waiting for the door. She pressed it years later carrying a bundle that cried, and the bundle became a child who ran and pressed the box and hid in the ivy at my roots, giggling, hand over mouth, and I could not tell, for a moment, which season I was standing in.
The box still sings. Different hands now, ones I have not learned yet. They will learn me: the good low branch, the shade, the ivy that is exactly the right size to disappear into if you are small and quick and full of laughter you cannot hold.
The door will open and close for all of them, briefly, this year, as it has for others. I will not go in. I have never needed to be let anywhere. I am already home, and I will still be ringing green in the spring long after the last of these small hands has stopped reaching for the little singing box.