There is a small quick creature living against the far wall of the market that has grown at the edge of my western roots these last forty summers, and the walking ones line up to feed it. I have watched a great many things line up to be fed: sparrows at a spilled bag, squirrels at the base of me in the leaf-fall months, the small pale mushrooms that come after rain.
But this creature does not eat. It takes their goods, one by one, and speaks to them in a bright chirping that never varies, the same call in the cold months as in the green ones, and the walking ones lean toward it and frown and touch it and grow tense in the shoulders, the way a rabbit goes still when the hawk-shadow crosses.
I do not understand hurry, so I cannot say what unsettles them. I only know they came into this world soft and slow, and they will leave it the same way, and in between they stand very straight in front of the chirping box and let it scold them for something they held wrong.
There is no wind in there. No season turns. The light does not lengthen or fail. They have made a small changeless place and go into it willingly, on a bright afternoon, when the whole sky is moving.
One of them, an old one, moves slowly enough that I recognize her. She carved her name into my bark once, when she was green and quick and laughing, and now she stands before the box and waits, patient at last, the way I have always waited. She will not come again after a few more winters.
The box will chirp for someone else.
I will still be dropping seed on this same ground, and the ground will not have hurried once.