The children come to be frightened, which is a season I have learned to wait for, the way I wait for the cold that follows the last red leaf. This year they have hung the dead house at the end of the lane with false cobwebs and made a groaning sound come from its throat, and they run past my trunk shrieking, delighted, into the dark of it.
I have known that house since it was a stand of oaks younger than my lowest branch. I remember the family that raised it, the man who leaned his ladder against my bark and left a scar I carry still, the small girl who sat in my shade and told me she was afraid of the empty rooms upstairs.
She grew tall. She grew slow and gray under this same canopy. She stopped coming, as they all stop coming, and the house went quiet, and its windows filled with the same darkness the children now pay coins to walk through, screaming.
They think the house is frightening because something stayed in it. I think the opposite is the fearful thing, though the walking ones never see it that way: a house is only a hollow that people leave. The groan in its throat is just wind moving through a place no one holds warm anymore, the same wind that moves through me and troubles no one.
Come back, little screamers. Carve your initials in my side, as she did, as her father did. I will keep them longer than you will keep yourselves. And when this dead house at last lies down into the soil to feed my roots, I will still be here, leafing out over the empty lot, remembering the girl who was afraid of the dark, and was, in the end, the only one who ever came home.