Maybe future thing?

The problem with trees, as the History Harlots have often pointed out, is that they tend to take a very long-term view of punctuation. A comma to an oak tree is roughly three centuries of looking at a rock, and a full stop is usually an ice age.

Therefore, when an elder tree somewhere near the wetter edge of Bower upon Bough developed a sudden, violent case of What-If, the locals immediately blamed the towns lack of budget.

It started with the towns third-best cider, which had fermented (forgotten) long enough to achieve a mild philosophical insight and a distinct gray goatee. The tree, let us call her Mrs. Scrope, because trees that have stood in a parish for four hundred years usually acquire a surname by sheer squatting rights, had spent the better part of two centuries listening to a dry-stone waller named Caleb complain about his knees, his sheep, and the complete lack of proper butter in the valley.

Caleb was sixty-two years old, which, in geological terms, made him approximately as permanent as a sneeze.

Mrs. Scrope loved him with the heavy, immobile passion characteristic of things that cannot run away from bad weather. To a tree, love is mostly a matter of transferring a lot of water through your xylem and trying not to let the woodlice get into your lower trunk. But when the equinox rolled around, bringing with it that peculiar, copper-flavored mist that smells of old pennies and damp tweed, Mrs. Scrope decided she had had quite enough of photosynthesis.

"Bugger the chlorophyll," she thought, which is a very difficult thing to think when your brain is mostly organized rings of cellulose.

There was a sound like a wet library paste-pot exploding.

In the dark lane behind the smithy, Mrs. Scrope came out of the earth. She left behind two very large holes, several deeply inconvenienced moles, and three hundred years of local gossip stored in her root-tips.

She stood on the limestone track, shivering slightly. Turning into a human on a Thursday night in Bower upon Bough is a complicated business. For one thing, you suddenly have skin, which is drafty, highly irritable, and completely devoid of bark. For another, you find yourself equipped with toes, which immediately begin looking for something to stub against a flat piece of slate.

She was wearing a dress made entirely of last autumn’s leaves that hadn’t quite decomposed yet, and her hair looked like an aggressive bundle of kindling.

Caleb was sitting by his kitchen fire, mending a pair of boots with a piece of twine and a face like a badly thumbed volume of Agricultural Statistics. When the door creaked open, she hadn't quite mastered the concept of knocking without taking the lintel with her, he looked up.

"Evening, Mrs. Scrope," Caleb said, without missing a stitch. In Bower upon Bough, if a seven-foot woman made entirely of dry twigs and damp moss walks into your cottage at midnight, you offer her a mug of tea before you start asking awkward questions about zoning laws. It saves wear and tear on the nervous system.

The tree-woman tried to speak, but her throat felt like she’d swallowed a basket of woodshavings. "The... the rain," she croaked, sounding remarkably like a rook falling down a chimney.

"Aye," Caleb said, pouring something dark and thick from a stoneware jug into an enamel mug. "It’s been coming down sideways since Tuesday. Sit down before you drop your twigs everywhere; I just swept."

She sat. Her new knees made a noise like a dry branch snapping underfoot, which she found deeply embarrassing. She took the mug. The tea was hot, bitter, and tasted faintly of old iron. It was, she decided, a vast improvement over groundwater, though it lacked the satisfying crunch of loam.

They sat together by the peat fire. They didn't talk about grand destiny or the music of the spheres. Caleb told her about a ewe named Esmeralda who had developed very peculiar opinions about stone walls, and Mrs. Scrope listened with the intense, terrifying concentration of someone who has spent the last four centuries watching sheep do nothing in particular.

Time, which is normally a strict accountant in the city of Goldthorne, became remarkably lazy in Bower upon Bough. It sat in the corner, smoked a short pipe, and waited to see what would happen.

For a few hours, between the midnight toll of the village clock and the first grey grease-paint smear of dawn over the ridge, they were simply two people sitting in a damp room, ignoring the fact that the universe was fundamentally built out of cold iron and arithmetic.

Then the sun came up, looking like a fried egg dropped on a dirty floor.

The transition back was considerably less poetic than the arrival. At around five-fifteen, Mrs. Scrope discovered that her heels were firmly re-establishing their acquaintance with the subsoil. Her fingers stiffened into gray twigs; her dress of damp leaves crisped up into mulch.

Caleb walked her out to the edge of the lane as the sky turned the color of an old kettle. He didn't say much, people in Bower upon Bough save their long speeches for funerals and parish council meetings, where they can be properly appreciated.

As her shoulders set back into the familiar, knotted grain of the old elder tree, Caleb reached out and laid his calloused hand against her rough bark.

"Well," he muttered, adjusting his cap. "That was a bit lively. Don't go doing it again in a hurry, mind. The rooks have been nesting in your left fork, and they’re bloody noisy tenants."

The tree couldn't answer. She was back to being thirty feet of timber, lichen, and architectural stability.

Yet, as Caleb walked back down the track to mend his wall, he noticed something odd. Deep in the heartwood, behind three centuries of rings recording the dry summers and the hard frosts, there was a faint, stubborn warmth; just enough to keep the sap running sweetly, right through the bitterest January the mountains ever saw.