As I was planting the first garden, I was taken aback by how out-of-touch with nature I was, how alienated from the outdoors I had become. My wife was not surprised at all. She chides me daily for how much time I spend at my computer. The moment I planted a garden I cared about, that estrangement changed. I became surprisingly attuned to the weather, to the weeds, to the local animals. An intimacy developed that I had no idea I was missing out on.

For one, I realized I had no clue how to plant the marigolds with which I planned to ring my garden, nor the slightest idea what marigold seeds even looked like. When I opened my first packet, I was surprised to see the barest whisp of a thing that looked more like a feather or an errant eyelash than a flower seed.

My feel for the crop that most fascinated me – potatoes – was also severely lacking. I failed to understand why they need to be spaced a foot apart and their rows separated by eighteen inches. Three weeks later, as their towering sprouts grew, bunched five and six leafy stocks to a mound, I realized that the above-ground portion of a potato plant was far larger than I had ever imagined.

I have heard that whether or not people end up thin or overweight in adulthood makes little difference to their self-image. The greatest effect is had by the persistence of their childhood view of themselves, whether they first felt effortlessly slender or shamefully stout. I am thinking now that it must be the same with imagining one’s self on a first-name basis with nature.

Having grown up in Colorado – perpetually outdoors, skipping from one sandstone perch to the next, a collection of self-discovered trilobites in a container on my desk, and a snake hidden from my mom beneath my bed – I carried an indelible image into adulthood of myself as a person intimately at home with Mother Nature’s goings and comings.

Attempting to plant my first garden well past the midcentury of my life quickly convinced me of the distance between the self I had long ago lost and the reality of who I had become – unaware to that point – as an adult.

One day as I was weeding, it occurred to me how parallel my lack of intimacy with nature was to some people’s alienation from people who are different from them. I began to understand that those “others” feel outside many Americans’ daily comings and goings as much as the reality of a potato top or marigold seed had recently resided beyond the bounds of my lived experience.

Had you asked me two months ago if I was an afficionado of the outdoors, I would have said, yes. I would have claimed it as surely as some people claim to understand the lives of others whose goings and comings seldom intersect their own and whose stories they have yet to hear with patient ears.