Nature is out to Get Me

This morning at 6:15, I headed to my car to leave for work. Given the hour, plus the fact that it was a Monday, I probably don't need to explain how chipper I was. Glancing at the side of the car, I notice it had been egged. Who would egg my car? I looked up and spotted a nest. Apparently, some poor unborn bird plunged from its home and smashed against my car window. It seemed like the perfect metaphor for a Monday morning, so I took pictures.





At nearly 7 p.m., after I'm finally done with teaching and attending school for the day, I make a quick stop at the public liberry to pick up a book on punctuation so that I can teach my fellow graduate students the basic rules on semicolon usage. In the five minutes it takes me to obtain this book, I come back out to find a crowd gathered in the parking lot. A thick twelve-feet-long tree branch had snapped off a tree and came down and either crushed or did significant damage (scratched up, broke the windows) to the three cars next to mine. My car, the fourth from where the tree stood, was covered in plenty of leaves and twigs, but seems to have suffered no actual damage.

Someone was crying, someone was swearing profusely, and I am just terrified. Sure, my car is perfectly fine, or, well, no different than it was before the tree branch fell, but I swear, nature is giving me some kind of warning. As an English teacher, I am fully aware that the falling egg foreshadowed the falling tree. But what if the tree is foreshadowing something? Is nature displeased with my bug killing attitude? Are the hippies right? At any rate, if I'm soon struck by lightning, or even a meteor perhaps, I can't say it's unexpected.