I’ve associated cardinals with my paternal grandparents for as long as I can remember. The backyard of their small but charming home in Hazlet, New Jersey, was where I had my first encounters with wild animals: Squirrels would come right up to take peanuts from my hand, and it was the only place I...

Sometimes my most significant revelations are the annoying, kick-me-in-the-pants ones that follow a period of contented denial. One of those seismic shifts in thought came last year at a dinner party, when a man nearly half my age honed in on a flaw in logic I’d subconsciously buried. A plant...