They have put out the folding chairs beneath me again, two clean rows of them, all facing the same young pair, and I have felt this exact arrangement press its little weight into my roots perhaps forty times now, so that I know the shape of the afternoon before it happens.
The pair stand very still, which is unusual for the walking ones, who are almost always leaving. Someone weeps. Someone laughs at the weeping. A wind comes up through my leaves at the wrong moment and lifts the thin cloth off the pale one's face, and everyone makes the same soft sound they always make, the sound of being surprised by something they came here expecting.
I do not know what they promise. I only know they promise it in my shade, under the same branch where, some sixty rings ago, a smaller pair carved two marks into my bark with a key. The marks are still here. They have widened and greyed as I have thickened, riding upward a little each year, and the hands that cut them are long gone from beneath me, though sometimes an old one is wheeled out to this spot and sits a while, touching the scar, saying nothing, looking up.
That is the part they never seem to expect, the walking ones: that they are the brief thing. They arrive in their best cloth certain this is the day the world was built toward, and they are right, for them. Then the chairs fold. The petals brown into my leaf litter and feed me. The pair walk off down the path, already becoming the old ones who will one day be wheeled back.
I will hold their two new marks the way I hold all the others, gently, and grow slowly around the wound.