The little hard-shelled ones have stopped moving beneath me, hundreds of them, nose to tail in the two grey rivers the walking creatures poured across my roots some sixty rings ago. They glitter in the low afternoon light and they do not go anywhere. I feel their heat rising into my lowest branches, a false summer, and I hear the long flat cry they make when they are unhappy, which is often.
I do not understand the trouble. They came here in such a hurry, all of them at once, as if the day would run out, and now they simply sit, packed close, warm, sheltered, together. This is not so different from how the starlings gather in my crown at dusk, or how the aphids crowd the tender new leaves.
Stillness in good company. And yet the walking ones inside seem to suffer it. One taps the wheel. One rests a head against the cool glass and closes its eyes. One rolls the window down and lets an arm hang out into the shade I am making, and for a moment, without knowing it, is only an animal resting under a tree, as its grandmothers rested, as I remember them resting.
Then the rivers loosen and they are gone, every one, off toward whatever place is better than this one.
I have shaded this crossing since before the grey rivers, before the hard shells, when it was oxen and mud and a boy who carved two letters into me that I still carry, healed over now, a small dark knot near my heart. He was in a hurry too. I am still here. The light is going gold.
I will hold this patch of shade open for the next ones, and the next, however briefly they choose to stay.