A small warm one has come to the walking creatures again, and they hold it the way a squirrel holds the first acorn of a doubtful autumn, with both hands, terrified of dropping the whole future.
I have felt this before. Every few dozen seasons a new pair comes to sit in my shade, and their hands change. Hands that once carved letters into my bark, quick and careless, now cradle a bundle no larger than the burl on my north side, and those same hands have gone slow.
They tremble. This is the only time I ever see the walking ones move as I move: as if a single wrong shift might undo years of unhurried work.
The little one does nothing. It cannot walk, which is the one thing they all seem so proud to do, always leaving, always returning shorter of breath. It only breathes and clenches and unclenches, a bud that has not yet decided which way the light is. Its fingers close around one adult finger the way a seedling's first root closes around a stone, without knowing why, only that holding is the work.
They lift it toward my branches so the moving light falls across its face, and the light does what light does to all new green things: it is welcomed without being understood.
They will not stay. I know this the way I know frost. This small one will grow tall and quick and go somewhere I cannot follow, and carve nothing, or carve everything, and one far spring another pair will sit in this same shade holding another warm bundle with those same trembling, slowing hands, and they will believe, as this pair believes now, that they are the first.
I will drop my leaves on all of them, gently, and keep the ground warm.