Why is living so big? These are the reasons.

Between Christmas and New Year's, my partner and I took the train across Canada, from Toronto to Vancouver. Four days, four nights, nearly three thousand miles. We'd been talking about it for ten years.

My grandfather is Norwegian, and every December he makes lefse, a soft potato flatbread, for Christmas. This year, he decided I was finally old enough to learn. I'm thirty-one.

Our community theater's holiday play this year was a musical version of a classic winter fairy tale, and they needed people to play the enchanted forest. I'd never acted in my life. I auditioned on a dare from my coworker.

My grandfather has been a Chicago Cubs fan for eighty-six years. He was born in 1930. The Cubs hadn't won the World Series since 1908. He used to say, "Maybe next year," every October of my life.

Our Thanksgiving table is never big enough. We borrow chairs from the neighbors, a folding table from the church, and somebody always ends up on a piano bench. This year we were twenty-two people, three languages and one very confused dog.

For my birthday in October, my wife surprised me with a trip to a wolf sanctuary in the mountains of New Mexico. I've loved wolves since I was a kid. I had posters of them on my bedroom wall.

Every fall, millions of monarch butterflies fly from the northern United States and Canada to a forest in the mountains of Mexico. This October, I learned to help track them.

Every September, the lake in our town hosts a cardboard boat race. The rules are simple: you can only use cardboard, duct tape and paint, and you have to paddle across the lake and back without sinking.

My father bought a 1967 Ford Mustang when he was nineteen. It was cherry red, and he took my mother on their first date in it. Then life happened. The car sat in my uncle's barn for thirty years under a tarp, collecting dust and mice.

My college roommate's family owns a small Punjabi restaurant two towns over. In September, she invited me to come in early on a Sunday, before opening, and learn to make naan from her father.

My grandmother doesn't understand most sports, and she doesn't care to. But this August, she became completely obsessed with the Rio Olympics gymnastics.

We drove from Pennsylvania to Colorado for our summer vacation, nineteen hours in a minivan with three kids. I was dreading it. Then my oldest put on the Hamilton cast album.

My brother and I went to Puerto Rico in August, and on our third night we took a kayak tour of a bioluminescent bay. I had seen pictures. I did not believe them.

I went to the beach alone on a Saturday in July with a paperback and no plans. Near my towel, a sign announced the annual sandcastle contest, teams of four, starting at nine. I'd never built anything bigger than a bucket mold.

Every summer, my church holds a Ukrainian festival, and the women of the parish make varenyky, the dumplings my grandmother made when I was small. I'd always just eaten them. In July I finally signed up to make them.

My son is fifteen, and for most of this year, our conversations have been one word long. "Fine." "Nothing." "Sure." Then, in July, Pokémon Go came out.

When I moved to a new city for work, I didn't know a single person. The first month was quiet in a way that felt heavy. I'd come home, heat something up, and watch the window.

In July, I finally cleaned out my parents' attic and held a yard sale. Boxes of my childhood toys: action figures, board games, a stuffed bear with one eye, and a huge plastic castle I'd played with every day when I was eight.

My daughter's Girl Scout troop had a sleepover at the aquarium in June, and I volunteered to be a chaperone. Twenty-two eight-year-olds and four very tired adults.

My father insisted that I learn to drive a stick shift before I turned thirty. "It's a life skill," he said. I had made it to twenty-nine and a half by avoiding the subject.