One of them dragged a bright cold pond in through the roots of my shade this spring and stood it against my trunk, upright, which is not how ponds behave. It does not soak the ground. Nothing drinks from it. No bird has ever landed on its surface, though many have flown at it and bruised their small hearts against the hard shine, fooled the way I would be fooled if I did not know better.
The walking ones come to it one at a time. A young one arrived in the first warm week and stood before the cold pond a long while, turning her head, touching her own face as if checking that it was still fastened on. She came back through the leaf-fall, slower.
She came back this spring with a smaller walking one holding her hand, and she lifted the little one up to the shine and they laughed at the two faces caught inside it, and I understood that the pond does not hold water. It holds them. Briefly. Only ever the one season they happen to be standing in.
That is the sad thing about the flat pond, if a thing so patient can be called sad. It cannot keep anyone. It shows the walking creature exactly as it is this afternoon, this light, this year, and then lets it go, and shows the next one, and forgets. It has no rings. It cannot remember that the tired woman was ever the girl who touched her own face against my bark.
But I can. I hold every one of them in the slow dark under my skin, growing, and I will still be counting light through these same leaves long after the bright pond has gone cloudy and the faces in it have all walked home.