The walking ones have made a door that goes nowhere and comes back, and they step into it one at a time, in the little glass wedge, and are carried around the way a seed is carried on the wind that will not let it land. I have watched them all this cold season, pushing the crossbar with a flat hand, faces already turned to whatever is next, and I confess I understand the going and the coming but not the spinning that is somehow both at once.
A door, to my knowledge, opens. This one only turns, and turns, and eats the wind before it can reach the warm inside, and lets the humans out changed only in that they are now on the other side of the glass, which to me is no change at all, since I have stood on one side of my own bark for four hundred winters and never once felt the poorer for it.
Sometimes two of them try the same wedge and laugh, shoulders touching, breath fogging the glass, and for that one turn they are close as two branches from the same wound. Then the door delivers them and they part and hurry off in different directions, as your kind always does, always leaving, always somewhere else to be by nightfall.
The small quick creatures push through and are gone before the leaf I dropped this morning has finished reaching the ground. They will push through a thousand more such doors and then, one spring, simply stop coming, the way the boy who carved two letters into my side stopped coming, and I will hold the letters he left, and the light, and the returning starlings, long after the door has ceased its patient, going-nowhere turning.