Why is living so big? These are the reasons.

Dear stranger at Gate B22 at O'Hare,

To the Uber driver who drove me home from the airport at 2 a.m. in March:

My next-door neighbors are a young Indian couple whose mother came from Chennai to stay with them for six months. She doesn't speak much English. I don't speak any Tamil. We became friends anyway.

My son's middle school chess club partnered with the retirement community across the street this year. Every Thursday, eight kids and eight residents play together in the sunroom.

Every Friday during Lent, our parish hosts a fish fry in the basement, and for the last six years I've run the kitchen. I'm not Catholic. I just love it.

For years, I drove the fastest route home from work: highway, exit, highway, home. Twenty-two minutes.

I teach high school Spanish, and my students found out it was my twentieth year of teaching. I have no idea how.

I had seen a thousand photos of the Grand Canyon before I went, and I thought I knew what to expect. I didn't.

My best friend and I made a promise in high school that someday we would hike to the top of the mountain we could see from our town. We talked about it for ten years. Life kept getting in the way.

When my elderly neighbor moved into assisted living this spring, she left me her garden gnome, a chipped, slightly creepy little man with a red hat and a fishing pole. "He needs someone to watch over," she said.

My mother, who is eighty, signed up for an intergenerational pen pal program through her library. She was matched with a ten-year-old girl named Priyanka who lives across town.

My daughter booked me a surf lesson for my fifty-fifth birthday as a joke. She thought I'd chicken out. I did not.

I hung a hummingbird feeder outside my kitchen window in May. Within a week, a tiny, furious, emerald-green hummingbird I named Napoleon had claimed it as his personal property.

At the end of the road to the beach where we vacation, there's a food truck run by a couple from Trinidad. It has no sign, just a hand-painted pepper on the side and a line every evening at six.

Every year, my third-grade class makes Valentine's cards for the residents at the nursing home down the street. This year, for the first time, we got to deliver them in person.

On April 8th, the whole cul-de-sac gathered in the Nguyens' driveway with folding chairs and cardboard eclipse glasses. We were right on the path of totality, and nobody wanted to watch alone.

I found my wedding dress at a thrift store for thirty-five dollars. It was ivory lace, a little yellowed, with a tag from a bridal shop in Ohio dated 1974.

At the water park this summer, my kids and I watched a grandmother, at least eighty, climb to the top of the tallest slide. She was wearing a bright floral swimsuit and a pink swim cap with rubber flowers.

On a hiking trail near my house, someone has been hiding painted rocks along the path. Ladybugs. Tiny houses. A rock that says "You're halfway there!" right at the halfway point. One with a perfect little portrait of a fox.

Last fall a windstorm knocked down half of my backyard fence. I'm a single mom with two kids and very little money, and I just stared at it for a week.