They have built a room for staying that is full of people who cannot bear to stay in it.
I know staying. I have done nothing else for four hundred winters. But these ones under the humming false light have not learned the trick of it, and so they do a strange busy stillness: the knee that jumps like a woodpecker against a branch, the folding and unfolding of a paper cup until it softens, the eyes going again and again to the door where a person in pale cloth might come and say the word they are waiting for.
They sit close to those they came with and touch them the way ivy touches me, lightly, all along one side, as if to be sure the other is still rooted there.
I have watched families gather in my shade like this before a storm, the small ones tucked in against the big ones, everyone quiet and looking the same direction. It is the posture of creatures waiting to learn whether the wind will take the whole grove or only one limb.
Some of them stand and go through the door and come back lighter, laughing, almost running, the way a branch springs up when the snow finally slides off it. Some go through the door and do not come back, and the ones left in the chairs grow very still, stiller than I have ever managed, and I understand then that for the walking creatures staying is not the gift I always took it for.
I cannot follow any of them out. I only keep the light coming through my leaves onto the same patch of floor, season after season, for whoever sits there next, and next, and next, long after this whole worried roomful has scattered like seed on the wind.