They have wheeled the small hard chairs into my neighbor's window across the street, a whole row of them, and each one holds a human who pedals and pedals and does not leave. I have watched many creatures work their legs beneath me: the squirrel who buried the acorn that became my youngest sibling, the horse that once dragged the plow through the field I have outlived.
Those legs carried something somewhere. These legs carry nothing anywhere. The humans pump and sweat and their mouths open in what I take for song, or perhaps pain, and when the light behind them goes red they push harder, and still the room does not move, and still they arrive nowhere, ever, no matter how the wheels spin.
I did not understand it, at first. Then I remembered the seasons.
Every spring my sap climbs and my buds swell and I labor upward with everything I have, and I do not move a single inch from this soil, and I have done this six hundred times and will do it again. I stay, and I grow anyway. Perhaps that is what they are learning in the bright red room: how to spend the whole heart's effort and remain exactly where you were planted.
It is a hard lesson. It took me a century to stop mourning the going I would never do.
There is one who comes each morning before the others, and rests her forehead against the cool glass a moment before she climbs on. I will remember her forehead. I remember all of them, the carvers and the leavers and the ones who wept in my shade one autumn and never came back.
This window will hold new faces soon enough.
I will still be dropping leaves on the same patch of ground, keeping their small warm ghosts, long after the wheels go quiet.