They have brought the whole meadow indoors, or rather brought the indoors out to me: a wall of sound with legs, a black tower taller than my lowest branches, throbbing so hard the sap trembles in my rings and the sparrows abandoned their nest by noon. I did not begrudge them. Things that loud usually mean weather, and weather passes.
For three days they have carpeted my roots with themselves. Thousands, more than I have leaves, sleeping in bright folded skins on the ground I have spent two hundred summers softening. They come to my shade between the loud spells, flushed and slick, and press their backs to my bark as if I were a cool thing they had discovered.
I hold them up. That is the only favor I know how to do, and I have done it for so many that pressing back has become a habit.
One of them carved a shape into me this morning, low, near the burl. It stung, in the way frost stings, slow. Two letters and a heart. I have worn a thousand such wounds; the bark grows a pale seam over each one and folds the name inward, keeping it, so that somewhere in my deepest ring is a whole village of the vanished, initialed, still here even after the walking part of them has gone wherever walking things go.
Tonight they will fold the black tower back onto its wheels and the meadow will empty in an afternoon, faster than I drop a single leaf. The grass will stand back up. The sparrows will return.
And I will keep the boy's two letters closed inside me, growing slowly outward, for the next three hundred rings, long after he has forgotten he was ever small enough to need my shade.