They have arranged themselves in a ring beneath my lowest branches, palms flat on a small table, and they are trying, with great effort and low voices, to speak to the ones who have already gone still.
I know the ones they mean. I remember them. The tall one who used to lean against my north side to catch her breath after the hill, whose hand I felt through my bark for many summers and then one autumn did not. The child who carved two letters near my root and grew heavy and slow and stopped coming.
They pass out of my shade the way light does at dusk, gradually, and then all at once, and then they are part of the ground I drink from, which is the only afterward I have ever known.
So I understand what the ring of them wants. They have felt someone leave and they cannot bear that leaving is a real thing. They hold hands and dim the little flame and ask the dark to send a voice back up the path.
But the dark does not send voices. The dark sends roots. The one they are calling is here already, has been here all along, folded into the loam, feeding the acorn that fell last October, rising this very spring in a pale green thing near their feet that none of them has thought to look down at.
They will fold the table away tonight, disappointed, certain no one answered.
I will keep the answer. I always do. In a hundred rings, when the ring of hands is gone too, some of it will still be reaching upward through me, into the light, quietly, where they finally stopped asking.