They have strung small hard lights inside my neighbor the gymnasium, and the walking ones have come in their good clothes to stand very still against the walls.
I know these ones. I held their swing when their legs were too short to touch the mulch, and I dropped my helicopter seeds into their open collars, and I let a certain few of them press dandelions into the crack of my bark, believing I would keep them, which of course I did, the way I keep everything, badly and forever.
Now they are taller and they will not look at each other. The music pulses through the wall and out into my roots, a fast season, and still they hold the wall as if it might leave without them.
A boy comes outside, alone, and puts his back against my trunk and breathes. I have felt this breath before, in his father, on a night much like this, some forty rings ago, before that man drove away and became a rarer and rarer visitor and then only a name a woman said sometimes, softly.
The boy does not know he is standing in the exact shade his father once hid in. I do. I hold both of them in the same patch of ground, one present, one long gone west, and to me they are nearly the same warmth.
He goes back in. The lights blink. A slow song now, and two of them find the courage to sway, arms held out stiff as fence posts, terrified, luminous.
By the time they marry, or don't, the lights will be down and the gymnasium dark.
I will still be here, dropping seeds into the collars of children not yet born, remembering this one spring when they were briefly, unbearably new.