One of the small ones stood beneath me in the grey wet today, and rather than lift her face to the rain the way any sensible living thing does, she raised over herself a black stretched skin on thin bones, snapping it open with a sound like a startled crow. To keep the rain off. To refuse the very thing I have spent three hundred springs opening my whole body to receive.
I drink through every root I own. I have learned to taste a storm before it arrives in the way the wind turns my leaves pale-side up, and I have never once wished it away. But she stood there dry inside her little portable roof, cross about the sky, and I understood that the walking ones carry small refusals with them, folded, tucked under an arm, ready.
The wind came, as it does. It took her skin-on-bones and turned it inside out, and she wrestled it, laughing now, and I felt the same wind bend me the way it has bent me since before her grandmother's grandmother sheltered under this same reach of branch, cross at the same sky.
She hurried off toward wherever the walking ones are always hurrying, and the rain closed over the place where she had stood as if she had never been dry at all.
I will still be drinking this same rain when her name is only a sound the birds don't make, and I will not have moved, and I will not have minded, and I will remember her: the one who came to my shade to argue with the weather, and lost, and went away smiling.