The two of them are sorting cloth again, on the grass by my western root, the way their kind has sorted cloth in my shade through more summers than I have kept count of, and I have kept count of many. Into the woven basket go the folded pieces, warm still from wherever the walking ones warm their skins; the smell reaches me faintly, soap and sun and the animal underneath it.
A sock escapes. The small human laughs. I have heard that exact laugh before, from a child who is now the tall one folding, though neither of them knows I remember, because remembering is the one thing I do without effort and they do only by trying.
They lift the basket between them, one handle each, and carry it toward the house, and this is the part I have never learned. They leave. They always leave. The basket empties and fills and empties, cloth going from body to water to sun to body again, a slow circling that I could almost mistake for something rooted, something staying, except that it is only the cloth that circles. The people themselves move through it once and are gone.
A wren lands on the rim of the abandoned basket, tips it, thinks better of it. The light goes gold, then grey. Someone will come back for the basket, or not, and either way the grass beneath it will yellow in its shape and green again when it is moved, a pale ghost of a basket printed on my ground for a week.
I have watched a hundred such baskets carried up a hundred such paths. I will hold the print of this one, and the laugh, long after the child who dropped the sock has grown, and folded her own children's cloth, and been carried up her own last path, in my shade, where I remain.