There is a small room at the base of the walking creatures' shelter where they gather to make heat and smell, and one of them has stood in it so many mornings that she has worn a soft hollow into the floor, the way water wears a hollow into stone, patiently, without meaning to.
I know her by her slowness. Most of them dart, but she moves at nearly my pace now, one hand always finding the counter's edge, and I have watched her through the window across so many turnings of the leaves that I remember when her hair was the dark of wet bark and now it is the pale of the underside of things.
This is not sad to me. It is only late summer arriving, as it must, in one particular creature.
The young ones come and sit at her low wooden table and she gives them warmth from her hands, and they laugh, and the small clatter of it rings against the glass. Then they go. They always go. This is the part I have never learned, in all my rings: how the walking ones can be given a whole morning of light and warmth and still need so badly to be somewhere else.
She lets them. She stands at the window afterward with a cloth in her hand and looks out at me, and I think we understand each other, she and I, two things that stay while the rest hurries by.
One spring the hollow in the floor will belong to no one, and the little room will go cold and quiet, and the young ones will come back slower, changed, to stand in it and weep. And I will still be here, holding my shade over the same ground, remembering the smell of her mornings long after the last of them has forgotten to.