These are the reasons.

When my father retired, he built a model railroad in his backyard. Not a small one. A garden railway that winds through the flower beds, crosses a little bridge over a pond he dug himself and goes through a tunnel under the patio.

My little sister moved to Japan to teach English for two years. This November, she flew home for the first time.

I teach English as a second language to adults, and this year my class was mostly women from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Guatemala and Ukraine. On the last day of the term, I asked them to share something from their home countries.

At nineteen, I spent a summer working the concession stand at the last drive-in movie theater in our county. It's still the best job I've ever had.

My grandmother's senior center hired a small traveling circus troupe for an afternoon in April: two jugglers, an acrobat, a clown named Pepito and a very elderly, very calm pony named Duchess.

On the night of a full moon in February, my friend Ingrid and I strapped on snowshoes and walked through the woods behind her cabin in Minnesota. No flashlights. We didn't need them.

This January, it was cold enough for long enough that the pond in our town park froze solid for the first time in years. The fire department tested the ice and declared it safe.

On an August evening at my grandparents' house in Iowa, my grandmother put a bushel of sweet corn on the porch and handed everybody a paper bag. "Shuck," she said. That was the whole instruction.

My daughter, who is ten, entered her school spelling bee for the first time this year. She studied every night for two months, with me reading her words at the dinner table and her little brother shouting out random, made-up words to distract her.

My son's fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Okonkwo, plays guitar for his class every Friday afternoon. He teaches them songs from all over the world: Nigerian highlife, Irish folk songs, a Brazilian samba and, by popular demand, the theme from a cartoon about a dog.

My son, who is three, saw the ocean for the first time this summer. We drove eleven hours to get there. I was nervous he wouldn't like it.

My dad and I drove from Chicago to my new college in Colorado in August. Sixteen hours. We decided to take turns picking songs.

I volunteer on Saturday mornings at a farm animal rescue about twenty minutes outside of town. It's home to goats, pigs, chickens, two donkeys, a very dramatic llama and a cow named Buttercup who weighs fifteen hundred pounds and thinks she's a lapdog.

For my mother's fiftieth birthday, I secretly asked fifty people who know her to write her a thank-you note: family, old friends, her coworkers, her hairdresser, the neighbor kid she taught to ride a bike.

On a day trip to the coast this summer, I ended up on a tour bus that was, except for me, entirely full of grandmothers from a church group in Pennsylvania. Forty-two of them.

On a trip to Kyoto, I wandered down a narrow alley in the rain and found a tiny tea shop with six seats. It was run by an elderly woman who didn't speak English and a very fat orange cat who sat on the counter.

My elderly neighbor, Mrs. Petrova, walks very slowly with a cane and waves at me every morning from her porch. I'd lived next to her for three years before I learned she'd danced with the Bolshoi Ballet in the 1960s.

When my grandparents downsized, they gave me their grandfather clock, which has stood in the front hall of every house they've lived in since 1952. It's taller than me and chimes every quarter hour.

My grandfather gave me his old wool coat this winter, saying he'd "outgrown it, sideways." I wore it to work the first day and put my hands in the pockets.

I volunteer once a week teaching gardening at the minimum-security correctional facility outside our town. It's not something I ever expected to do. It's become one of my favorite things in my life.