More good memories

Ages around 8 to 15.
Outside, exploring nature. That means I’m turning over rocks and finding bugs and slime-coated things found only under rocks. I’d often find ants carrying tiny white eggs. I wasn’t the type to destroy such things and I always put the rock back, gently, where it was. Even better were pools of water. There was one at the school I went to from kindergarten through third grade. It was adjacent to a small wetlands and shallow, and only about five yards long and two yards wide, but when you really looked you’d find minnows, tadpoles, and frogs. 

To organisms, trees are villages, cities, or nations.

In summer, tidal pools in rock formations at New England beaches teemed with life. Little fish, periwinkles, hermit crabs, starfish, mussels, crabs, all hiding, draped in seaweed. 
My natural world took on greater dimensions with gifts of a microscope and a pair of binoculars. I still have the binoculars and the Petersens Field Guide to Birds, and I wish I still had the microscope. I also got a telescope. It was fairly powerful but not great for star gazing because the eyepiece was straight and the trees in anyplace I’ve lived made it only possible to see things far above the horizon. I had to sit low and crane my neck to look at anything. It gave me some good sights nonetheless, especially of the moon. I was nearsighted and didn’t get glasses until fifth grade, so seeing the moon through a telescope was the first time I could really appreciate its shape as a three-dimensional sphere, a big thing that had mountains that cast shadows. I also saw a binary star. 
My telescope wasn’t powerful enough to make out Saturn’s rings. Those I saw in college in the quad of Old Kenyon, when a student two years ahead of me had set his telescope up and was inviting people to look through it. My own had no tracking capabilities and it surprised me how fast the moon would pass out of its field of vision. With his, you could stare at Saturn for long minutes, and be awed by it.

Nature

A Philadelphia suburb, fall, 1975. The Complete and Total Loser and his classmates are on a college campus across the street from his high school. There's a small pond there, home to some fish, other unknown water dwellers and a jumble of ducks of varying sizes and colors. On one side of the pond is mowed grass. On another an acre or so of ungroomed woods.
The Loser and two other ninth graders, all boys (the school is single sex), are working on a biology class project assigned by a progressive teacher who has severe diabetes and has the distinction of being one of the longest surviving people to receive dialysis. He will die by the end of the academic year and is seldom well enough to teach his class now. This gives the Loser and others permission to go off campus, where they smoke pot and cigarettes and swear at full volume. Boys with bumpy skin wearing sport coats and neckties, sitting on rotting logs smoking Marlboros.

These many years later, though, it's the assigned work the Loser remembers. Each group picked a square meter of ground and examined it in detail. They dug a foot deep, took plant samples, and swept a net repeatedly back and forth over the site, grazing the grass and other fauna, to collect whatever insects lived on it.
The Loser doesn't remember the exact number, but it was in the double digits. Dozens of species, living together even as they competed on land that was not remarkably fertile.
Human beings are the only species on earth that could voluntarily, peacefully, bring about their own end. Imagine what a beautiful planet this would be in just a few centuries if we did. The seas, teeming with life. The land rich under clear skies.

The Honeycomb

Today the Complete and Total Loser found a honeycomb while walking from the train station to his parents' house. It took him back to his boyhood days, when finding animal technology like this was a wondrous hint of another world hidden yet surrounding him.

Whatever happened to animals? All they are now to people is pets, pests or food. It would be nice, the Loser thinks, if they presented real dangers to large numbers of humans. It'd keep us humble.