They came in the dark clothes again, the way they do when one of them has stopped, and they stood beneath me in that slow clump that means someone is inside the box they carry so carefully, and I felt their feet press the cold spring ground above my roots, dozens of small still weights that did not shift the way feet usually shift.
I know the small one at the front. She used to run at me. Years and years of leaf-fall ago she was knee-high and furious, whacking my bark with a stick, and I dropped a helicopter seed on her head and she laughed so hard she sat down in the mud.
I have watched her get taller through I do not know how many summers, her the way they all get taller and then, quite suddenly, stop, and today she was tall and shaking and holding another one who was shaking, and neither of them looked up.
They lowered the box into the ground the way the birds tuck seeds under the soil in autumn, gently, with the whole weight of hoping. I understand this part. I do not understand where the one in the box has gone, only that the walking creatures believe going is a thing that can happen, that a body can be somewhere and then be nowhere, that you can leave.
I have never left. I have only widened.
The wind moved through my new leaves and dropped light down onto all their bent heads, and I gave what I have always given, which is shade, and the sound of leaves, and the same patch of ground I have offered every one of them who ever grieved here. She will come back.
They always come back for a while, and then the coming back thins, and then the coming back is someone new who never knew her, standing where she stood, under the same green.