Why is living so big? These are the reasons.

My spice drawer is a small archive of everywhere I've been. Saffron from a market in Valencia, in a little tin with a lady on it. Sumac my friend Yusuf brought back from his mother's kitchen in Gaziantep. A jar of smoked paprika I bought on my honeymoon. Chili flakes from a farmers market in Santa Fe where the farmer made me taste six kinds first.

My four-year-old fills his pockets with acorns on every walk. Dozens of them. I find them in the washing machine, under the couch, in my shoes.

My partner writes the grocery lists in our house, and somewhere along the way they started turning into poems. Not good poems. Wonderful, terrible poems.

To the woman who handed me a tulip at the train station on April 3rd:

I moved into a twelfth-floor apartment with my anxious rescue greyhound, Lotte, who had never seen an elevator. The first time the doors opened she backed away like it was a dragon's mouth.

I took the overnight train from Chicago to New Orleans this spring because I wanted to see the country slowly. I shared a dining car table with strangers at every meal, which the train does on purpose.

My friend Ximena's grandmother, Doña Lupe, offered to teach me to make tortillas when I mentioned I'd never made them. I showed up at her kitchen on a Saturday morning expecting a quick lesson.

Every winter, the wooden fence outside the elementary school on our street turns into a gallery of lost mittens. Whoever finds one hangs it on a fence post, so its owner can find it on the way home.

My partner and I had planned a picnic at the park for our anniversary. It rained. Hard.

I entered the county fair pie contest on a dare from my coworker, Ines. I'm not a baker. I made my grandmother's rhubarb pie from a stained recipe card, and the crust cracked down the middle.

My grandmother's hands are small and covered in thin skin like tissue paper, with knuckles that have gotten bigger over the years. They are the most capable hands I know.

My husband is a volunteer firefighter, and every Tuesday the station has taco night for the volunteers and their families. Fourteen people crammed around a folding table under the fluorescent lights, a giant pan of carne asada, a crockpot of beans, and three kinds of salsa nobody agrees about.

When I started as a baker at a café downtown, my shift began at 4 a.m. My friends thought I was out of my mind.

My grandfather, who is ninety, calls me every morning at seven-fifteen to give me the weather report. He lives four states away. The weather where he lives has no effect on me whatsoever.

There are seventeen stone steps down to the little cove behind my aunt's cottage on the Maine coast. I've counted them since I was small, out loud, every summer.

For my mom's sixtieth birthday, I ordered a cake from the bakery downtown. When I opened the box at the party, it said "Happy Retirement, Gary!" in blue frosting.

I signed up for a beginner pottery class at the community art center because I wanted to make my own coffee mug. Eight weeks later, I have made zero mugs and approximately forty lumps.

Every June, my mother hosts a garden party in her backyard and insists that every guest wear a hat. Not an ordinary hat. A ridiculous hat.

My daughter plays the tuba in her high school marching band. The tuba is almost as big as she is. I have never been prouder of anything in my life.

There's an old arboretum near my apartment that most people drive right past: huge oak trees, winding paths, benches, squirrels everywhere. A gardener named Luis has tended it for twenty-seven years, and every fall he plants daffodil bulbs by the hundreds.