Sadness and loneliness flowed within her slow sap for many seasons.

But at the base of her roots, in a little nest of dirt, totally unaware of her weighty and lumbering thought, tiny ants built a nest. The ants in that nest lived fast little ant lives, unthinkingly eating and building and dying. They would crawl all over her bark from the base to the tip in their daily errands, looking for things to eat or build. To the ants she was as vast as a city, and every day they would set out on a tireless mission to explore every one of her branches.

Though Daphne was too slow to know any individual ant as it hunted and built and perished in the spans of time, their constant tiny presence punctuated her vast aloneness. Familiarity breeds affection. In time she came to love the constant presence of these tiny other lives, came to think these ants as hers to care for. Though she knew these tiny unfeeling ants could never return her love.