Why is living so big? These are the reasons.

I am eighty-three years old, and I have hosted Thanksgiving for fifty-one of them.

My dad has collected stamps since he was nine. This year, at seventy-four, he decided to give the collection to my daughter, who is also nine.

My friend Jun and I hiked six miles up a mountain in Washington this August to stay overnight in an old fire lookout tower you can rent for forty dollars a night. It's a single room, all windows, perched on top of a peak.

My father has never danced in his life. At family weddings, he stands near the bar, holding a drink, nodding to the music. We stopped asking years ago.

My grandson lives in Australia. I live in Ohio. It's fourteen hours apart, which means our "Sunday cooking class" happens on his Monday morning and my Sunday night.

At 4:12 a.m. on a Tuesday in February, my phone buzzed with a photo: a tiny, red, furious baby wrapped in a striped hospital blanket. My daughter had texted: "Meet Rosie."

The barista at the coffee shop near my office draws a tiny picture on every cup. Not just hearts. A cat in a top hat. A sun with sunglasses. A very determined snail. Once, a little drawing of me, labeled "Medium Oat Latte Person."

I wasn't expecting to cry at my son's wedding. I definitely wasn't expecting it to be during his speech, when he started talking about me.

Our apartment complex has a strip of patchy brown grass between the parking lot and the fence that nobody ever used. In March, a few of us asked the management if we could plant a garden there. To our shock, they said yes.

Our local library has a program called "Paws to Read," where kids who are nervous about reading out loud read to specially trained, very patient dogs. I signed up my shy eight-year-old, Leo, half expecting him to refuse.

My father isn't much of a talker. He shows love through food, mostly rice.

On the hottest night of July, my friends and I drove out to the old quarry lake after midnight. The water was warm on top and cold underneath, and the sky was full of stars.

My sixteen-year-old announced on a Tuesday that she was cooking dinner. For the whole family. By herself. "Don't come in the kitchen," she said.

My grandmother's watch stopped working this year, a small gold watch my grandfather gave her for their tenth anniversary in 1962. Every jeweler I took it to told me it wasn't worth repairing.

I take a ferry to work every morning across the harbor. It's twenty-two minutes of the best commute in the world.

My grandmother, Dot, makes twelve pies every Thanksgiving. Apple, pecan, pumpkin, sweet potato, chess, and a mince pie that only my uncle eats.

For our tenth anniversary in the house, my partner baked a cake shaped exactly like it. Down to the crooked shutter, the blue front door and the oak tree in the yard, made of broccoli dipped in green frosting for reasons I still don't fully understand.

In August, a sixteen-year-old named Lukas arrived from a small town in Bavaria to live with us for a school year. He had one suitcase, perfect manners and absolutely no idea what a s'more was.

Our town's Christmas parade is about twelve minutes long. It has the high school marching band, three fire trucks, a tractor decorated with lights, the Girl Scouts riding on a hay wagon, and Santa on the back of a convertible borrowed from the car dealership.

My three college roommates and I have had lunch together every Thursday for twenty years. Same Italian place, same booth by the window, same waiter, Vito, until he retired last year.