Some lessons.

We're nature girls, my daughters say -- and they are -- but even they can't comprehend the baby copperhead snake split in half on the sidewalk. "Did an animal do that?" Madeleine wants to know, and I say, No, it was a person. "Why?!" She wants to know, outrage coloring her 6-year-old voice, still small but in the process of changing, right now and all the time, into something more world weary, something more in-the-know. Probably because they were scared, I say, hands in the air, a shrug.

This is nature, too, I want to explain. Humans will do all kinds of brutal, unnecessary things in the name of fear. Like what, they will ask, and I will say, Like killing a snake. Like hurting each other. Like all kinds of terrible things.

Madeleine is hands-on-hips furious, glaring up at me. Violet is crumpled-knees curious on the sidewalk, watching ants crawl over the snake's split carcass. "That snake wouldn't have hurt anyone," Madeleine says, gesturing down at the snake. "They should've just left it alone!"

I know, I know, I say. It's really terrible.

In my memory of this the trees are so green in the light that they glow. Cicadas buzz in the trees and mosquitoes bite and bite and bite. It must have been hot, late spring in Texas. We keep walking and Madeleine chases lizards. Violet meanders. I don't give the girls that lesson about nature, about human nature, but I believe they learned it anyway. It will come burbling to the surface one day when they are older, unbidden. And when it does I hope they'll remember: Probably because they were scared, and it will be that little bit of empathy they'll need to remember how to be good people in the world.