Two recent encounters with nature:

1) A squirrel is sitting on a disintegrating wood-block parking marker that lays outside my back window looking onto the alley, and as I watch it, from somewhere it gets a big partially-gnawed avocado seed, and begins to gnaw it some more.

2) As I jog through a park with big trees that’s north of my house one early evening, there’s a group of (late teens) (white) kids all staring up into the branches of this large tree, and so I slow down on the woodchip path before I pass them, and I ask them what’s up, and they say there’s baby owls around and a mother, too, and that they found out through the F*ceb**k page of the local Audobon Society, and if you look up in the tree, you can see the mother owl.

So, I do, and then I say that now I’ll have to tell my friends about it, and they all start laughing at that, as I go to jog off.