The small one has dropped a strip of white bark at my roots, thin as birch skin and printed with the marks the walking ones make to remember, and the wind is already worrying it loose.
I have felt a hundred springs push sap up through me, and in that time I have watched these creatures grow ever more careful about the things they carry away and ever more forgetful of the things they leave. This ribbon of paper is a kind of counting. I understand counting.
I count in rings, one for each turn of cold to warm, and I keep every one, folded quietly into my own dark middle where nothing is ever thrown down. They count in numbers on paper and then let the paper go, which is the part I cannot follow. To make so careful a record and then release it to the wind, that is a strange faith.
It says they trust the memory of the thing more than the thing itself.
A sparrow considers it, decides it is not food, and returns to my branches. Rain will come by nightfall and soften the ink to a gray bruise, and by the second frost the paper will be pulp, and by the spring after that it will be soil, and my roots will drink whatever it was they thought worth writing down.
They walk so quickly, these ones. They come with full arms and leave with fuller ones and never sit long enough for a single leaf to yellow above them. I will hold this patch of shade for the small one, in case it returns older, changed, wanting to sit. The paper will be gone.
I will not.