The story begins with an old oak tree who is three hundred and sixty-five years old. Unlike humans, who are awake by day but sleep at night, trees stay awake through three seasons of the year but sleep through winter. During the summer, the oak tree would speak with the Ephemora, a species of fly which lives for only one day. The oak tree would lament that they only had a single day to live, and suggest that their lives must be filled with such melancholy. The flies would invariably refute him, saying that their lives were filled with many moments of beauty. They claim that the beauty of the world does not end upon death, and that the flies measure time in moments rather than the tree's years, so the flies and the oak tree have the same amount of time to live; they only reckon it different