RECENTLY I WALKED the two miles home from work with my 8-year-old son. I’d wanted to take the bus, but he suggested hoofing it.

“What can we do when we walk?” I asked.

“We can talk,” he said.

So we headed up Thayer Street in Providence, with Noah explaining the difference between Star Wars characters that seemed to me to come and go with each movie. As we passed Avon Cinema, he stopped in mid-sentence to identify a turkey vulture soaring west to east at a fairly high altitude over our heads.

Outside Moses Brown School, Noah picked up a spiky triangular nut dropped from a copper beech tree.

“Do people eat these?” he asked.

“Squirrels,” I replied.

On the school grounds we heard a killdeer. This is a type of bird called a plover. We found the killdeer standing between yardage markers on the artificial turf of the football field. Did the bird, which eats ground insects, such as grasshoppers, know the ground under its feet was synthetic?

A couple of blocks north on Morris Avenue, I raised my arm to point out a patch of dill planted along the sidewalk. Noah took the gesture as “let’s hold hands.” He grasped my fingers in his. A huge smile on my face, I decided not to mention the dill. We walked home hand in hand.

A few days later, we escorted his sister, Rachel, 11, to a late afternoon “play date” several blocks from our home.

Along Intervale Road, the flowering dogwood trees were ripe with clusters of shiny red berries, an important food for migrating birds and other wildlife.

While Noah and Rachel recreated their most awesome soccer moves, I suggested that the two of them tiptoe toward a fruit-laden dogwood, covered in red and purple leaves.

Just before the children reached the tree, a dozen-or-so iridescent bronze and purple grackles exploded from deep within the foliage. The kids howled in delight.

Three hours later I escorted Rachel home. We crossed the street, where she said, “Look!” There was a slug the size of a cigar. Its sidewalk trail glistened in the moonlight between a stone wall and a strip of grass.

By habit, I guess, Rachel reached out and took my hand. She suggested that we count the different types of cricket chirps. We noted several steady songsters, a couple of slower chirpers, a lone insect that emitted an occasional tick sound and another that produced an intermittent sequence of clicks.

The East Side was relatively quiet, which allowed us to perceive the irregular chip, zeet, or zip calls of migrating songbirds in the darkened sky overhead. Most songbirds migrate at night.

Near home, we stopped to admire the neighborhood’s most unusual planting — tobacco. This was not the showy, sweet-smelling garden-center variety, but the genuine, lettuce-leaved former staple of the Southern economy.

In the days following those strolls, I realized that opening my hand to the children opened my heart. It shrank my ego, renewed my spirit, and left me awestruck.

Scott Turner is a Providence-based nature writer. His columns appear here each Saturday ( scottturnerster@gmail.com).