There is a cold white cupboard humming in the corner of the room where the small ones eat, and it is the only thing in there that never sleeps. I have watched it through the window for many summers now, since the year they cut my low branch to make the road wider.
It stands where the hearth used to be, in the house that replaced the older house, which replaced the field. It breathes without lungs. A quiet, tireless breath, the same in January dark as in the long green evenings, a warmth I do not understand pushed out of its back to keep a smaller cold in its belly.
The walking ones open it many times an hour. They stand in its pale light with the door held wide, looking in, the way birds tilt their heads at the ground before they find nothing there either. They do not seem to be hungry. They seem to be checking that the cold is still keeping its promise, that the season they have built inside the box has not slipped away while they were gone.
I have grown my rings around a hundred autumns and never once kept a berry past its falling. What ripens, drops. What drops, feeds the ground, which feeds me. But they have made a small winter they can carry into the house, and inside it they hold the light off the fruit, off the milk, off the last of things, a little longer. A stubborn little wintering against the going of everything.
The child who left the door open too long, who was called back to shut it, will grow tall and forget this kitchen entirely. The humming box will be hauled away and replaced, as the hearth was, as the field was.
And I will still be here, dropping what I ripen, keeping nothing.