Why is living so big? These are the reasons.

There's an old woman in my neighborhood who sets up an easel on the corner of 9th and Holly every morning at seven and paints the same street scene. She's been doing it for years.

My mother-in-law bakes pies. A lot of pies. About forty a month. She gives them all away.

There's a little café near my office with a chalkboard by the register. If you want, you can pay for an extra coffee, and they write it on the board: "1 coffee, from Lisa." Anyone who needs a coffee can come in and claim one, no questions asked.

On a road trip down the California coast, my partner and I took a detour through the Avenue of the Giants, a thirty-mile road through ancient redwood forest.

On our honeymoon in Maui, my husband and I went snorkeling at a beach where the guidebook promised sea turtles. We spent an hour seeing nothing but sand and a few gray fish. We were about to give up.

On a trip to Dublin, I got into a taxi with a driver named Seamus who was about seventy and asked me, within thirty seconds, whether I liked music.

When I moved into my tiny city apartment, my mother gave me a Meyer lemon tree in a pot. "Every home needs something growing," she said.

My seventeen-year-old daughter got her first job this summer, scooping ice cream at the shop on Main Street. She came home sticky and exhausted every night.

To Mrs. Kowalski, wherever you are:

Our neighborhood association turned an old garden shed into a "tool library." You can borrow a drill, a ladder, a pressure washer or a pasta maker for a week, for free, with a library card made of laminated cardboard.

A bouquet of roses was delivered to my door on Valentine's Day with a card that said "To my darling Patricia, all my love, Harold." I am not Patricia. I live alone with a cat named Bean.

This year I made a goal of writing one thank-you note every week. Not for gifts, just for people.

My father-in-law gave me a bonsai tree for my birthday this year with very serious instructions. He's been growing bonsai for forty years. He has a juniper that is older than me.

For my mother's seventy-fifth birthday, my brothers and I hired a mariachi band to serenade her at seven in the morning, the way my father used to do every year before he got too shy about it.

My daughter came home from first grade one day and announced that her best friend was Ms. Dolores, the lunch lady.

Our street started a holiday cookie exchange five years ago with six families, each bringing a dozen cookies. This year there were thirty-four families and over four thousand cookies.

I've been married to Simone for twenty-two years, and I want to write about her laugh.

My granddad spent forty years as a mechanic, and his garage is a museum of his life: walls covered in license plates, a calendar from 1983 he never took down, a radio permanently tuned to an oldies station, and coffee cans full of every bolt and screw ever made.

My grandmother is ninety-one and had never used a smartphone until I gave her one for her birthday. The first week was chaos.

My neighbor decided to bake her own wedding cake. She has no baking experience. She practiced in her kitchen every weekend for three months, and since we share a wall, I became her official taste tester.