This year the little ones come dressed as animals, which is the first sensible thing they have done under me in a decade. All spring I watch them arrive in bright fur that is not fur, tails that do not grow but are pinned on, paws that never touched soil, and I think: yes, good, finally you remember you are creatures.
They gather by the doors of the big glass hive across the road and they hug. That is what I notice most. The walking ones so rarely touch. They pass beneath my branches a thousand a day with their arms folded around their own glowing rectangles, but these ones open their arms wide inside enormous soft heads and hold each other for whole minutes, long enough that a wren could build in the pause.
One sat against my trunk to rest, a great blue creature with a fan spinning in its chest to keep the human inside from wilting. It leaned its false muzzle to my bark and was quiet. I know that weight. I have held children who grew into the parents of children, all of them certain they were the first to lean here, none of them staying.
They will scatter by Sunday. The fur will go back into bags, the tails will be folded away, and the ones inside will walk out looking ordinary and cold and unrecognizable to each other on any other week. It always saddens me, how briefly the walking things let themselves be seen.
But the blue one carved a small paw print into my bark before it left. Shallow. Clumsy. It will still be legible in its skin when the hand that cut it is grass, and I will keep it, the way I keep them all.