Two of them arrived at different times, which is how I have always known them: never in step, one waiting under my lowest branch, pretending to study the bark, tracing the same groove of it over and over with one finger while the other has not yet crested the hill. I have felt this exact tremor before, ten thousand springs of it. The waiting one's pulse comes up through the roots the way a nervous sparrow drums the trunk.
Then the second, and something in both of them changes temperature. They sit on the bench a careful hand's width apart. They laugh at things that are not, by any measure of mine, funny. One keeps checking the bright rectangle in her pocket and then hiding it, ashamed, as if I would judge her for wanting the sun to move faster.
It will not. It never has. I have watched whole marriages begin and end in the time it takes my leaves to turn once.
They do not know that a thousand of them have sat exactly there. I hold the memory of every carved heart in my flesh, healed over into knots now, the initials of walkers long turned back to soil, their letters still swelling slightly with each ring. Some of those pairs came back. Most did not. I could not tell you which of these two is which, and I have learned not to hope, only to shade.
The light is going amber. One reaches, almost, toward the other's hand, and stops. Reaches again.
Whatever they decide, I will keep the bench cool for the next ones. There are always next ones.
I will still be counting summers here when the name they are about to whisper has gone quiet in every mouth on earth but mine.