Along Leona Canyon, it’s past time for dog walkers to crowd the trail, we head out, hills greener from rain, a private consult between me and my partner-in-crime from the thirteenth century, who’s startled by a collection of oak balls, withered and dead on arrival; he thinks maybe it’s a burial site, a mass castration; I shake my head no, tell him how these are swellings, galls that an oak tree forms in reaction to insects, how oaks grow everywhere, not like the American Chestnut that went extinct years ago. He stops at another pile of oak balls and kicks them around, says, enough already, wants to know the real reason I asked him here. Talk to him about the forest in the trees.