They set the flat wooden thing down between my roots the same spring a small quick one first sat there, and she sat there many afternoons after, growing longer in the leg each season until her feet no longer swung above the ground but pressed flat into it, the way roots learn to.
I do not know where the walking ones go when they leave the bench. This has troubled me across more seasons than I can count. They arrive warm, they rest their weight against the slats, they lean their spine into the grain the way a young branch leans toward light, and then, for reasons I have never grasped, they stand and are gone before the shadow of my lowest limb has moved the width of a leaf.
The flat thing wears the way I wear. Its skin greys, its edges soften, a name was cut into it once and the cut has healed pale and shallow now, the way my own bark closes slowly over every hurt. Birds foul it. Rain swells it. It endures, in its small mimicry of staying.
She came back grey herself, many summers on, and sat where her swinging feet once could not reach, and rested her hand flat on the wood a long while, longer than the young ones ever manage, as though she too had finally learned the one thing worth learning here.
Then she stood, as they all do, and went wherever the leaving ones go.
The bench remains. I remain. Next spring some new quick one will sit and swing her feet in my shade, not knowing whose warmth she is borrowing, and I will hold my leaves over her, and say nothing, and stay.