This year they have filled the flat-roofed building across the road all at once, the way starlings fill me some Octobers, a sudden noisy crowd that will not last the cold.
I watch them arrive in the dark before light, breath smoking off them, and go inside to move without going anywhere. Through the tall bright windows I see them running on belts that hold them in place, lifting weights and setting them down in exactly the spot they lifted them from.
I have known this hunger. Each spring the sap climbs me and I strain upward with everything I have, and by autumn I have gained perhaps the width of a wren's leg, one pale ring under the bark, and no one applauds and no one sees. Growth is slow. It is nearly all the growing does.
But they want it now, in a season, and January is the wrong season for anything to grow. My own roots know this; they simply wait in the cold ground, patient, drinking what little the frost allows.
By the time the buds come I can already feel it thinning. Fewer breaths smoking in the dark. The lot half empty. The belts still. They are not lazy, these quick ones. They are only trying to live a whole lifetime of change inside one turn of the light, and there is not enough winter in the world to hold that much wanting.
I have kept the same name carved in my bark for sixty summers, a boy's initials gone soft and grey at the edges. He never came back to see how far they rose. Most of them do not. I will hold his letters through this January and the next, and the belts will spin again next year for a different crowd of the briefly hopeful, and I will still be here, adding my one slow ring, unwatched, unhurried, growing.