My mother despised nature. Boy scouts on camping trips seemed suicidal—my God, the poison ivy, the humming mosquitoes with their full tanks of disease. Why take your lives in your hands, gentlemen? She raised me to fear all greenery, all wild animals—even squirrels and frogs. (Squirrels can be rabid. Frogs can pee on you and cause warts.) My mother said things like: What’s wrong with communing with nature from a screened-in porch? Why do we have to go traipsing through it to feel alive? My mother has always felt plenty alive—her nervous system set to overdrive. She shakes with life. Her voice—always under a bit of pressure—can still call out with more vitality—if not high-pitched panic—than all other mothers I know combined.

My father had been raised in the mountains of West Virginia. He loved nature. He sang John Denver songs at the top of his lungs. He longed to be in the great outdoors. He was, however, a corporate lawyer who spent most of his hours in a stuffy office, yanking at his neckties. (But he was otherworldy. He was living another life in his rich mind, which is why his shiny business shoes often didn’t match—one blacker and more worn than the other. Also, he often dressed in the dark so my mother could sleep in.) When he drove past cows bowed to fields, he often leaned out of the window, banged on the roof of the car, and mooed to them—as if he understood, deeply, what it was to be penned up.

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