Why is living so big? These are the reasons.

I found an old Smith-Corona typewriter at a garage sale for fifteen dollars. It was sky blue, with one sticky key and a ribbon that had dried out decades ago. I spent a month restoring it at my kitchen table.

My two kids, ages ten and twelve, spent the entire summer building a raft out of old pallets, plastic barrels and rope. They watched videos. They drew plans. They argued constantly.

When my first grandchild was born, I planted a maple in our backyard and put a little wooden sign beside it with her name. Now I have seven grandchildren and seven trees.

My little sister called me in February to tell me she was pregnant. Then she said, "With three." I made her repeat it twice.

My mother-in-law is Vietnamese and makes the best pho I've ever tasted. When I married her son, I asked her to teach me. She said yes, but only if I started at five in the morning.

My family moved from Ghana to Minnesota in October. My children had never seen snow. They didn't believe me when I told them about it. "Ice falling from the sky?" my daughter said. "Like a freezer?"

My daughter is seven and has been searching for a four-leaf clover in our backyard every day since she learned they existed. Every single day. For two years.

I grew up in Florida and spent my whole adult life somewhere flat. This spring, at forty-two, I finally saw real mountains, on a trip to Colorado with my wife.

My seven-year-old lost her first library book this spring. She was devastated. It was a book about owls, and she'd loved it, and now it was gone.

When we bought our first house, my father showed up the next weekend with a truck full of lumber. He's eighty-one. He said, "Every house needs a porch swing," and wouldn't let us help except to fetch screws.

My grandmother's apple orchard in Washington has forty-two trees, some of them planted by her father in the 1930s. Every September, the whole family comes for a picnic during the harvest.

My husband is an engineer and spent four months building a machine that makes pancakes. It's made of an old printer, a hot plate, a squeeze bottle and a lot of wires. It can draw pancakes in any shape you program into it.

I played trombone in high school and then put it in a closet for forty-four years. When I retired, my wife told me our town's community band was looking for brass players. "Go," she said. "You hum marches in the shower."

My grandfather's piano sat in my parents' basement for almost twenty years after he passed. Nobody played it. It was out of tune and covered with boxes.

My daughter gave me a blacksmithing class for my sixtieth birthday. "You're always saying you want to make something real," she said. She came with me.

Every Saturday from April to October, I volunteer with a trail crew in the state park. We're a strange group: a retired dentist, two college students, a nurse, a mail carrier and me, a software developer who sits at a desk all week.

My grandfather has done the same magic trick for every grandchild: he pulls a coin out of their ear. There are eleven grandchildren. He's done it thousands of times.

After a big storm in January, my kids set up a hot chocolate stand at the end of our street, where people were walking home from the train station through the snow.

I joined a masters rowing club at forty-eight. Masters means "over twenty-seven," which made me laugh, but also means I'm in a boat with seven other people, mostly in their fifties and sixties, at five-thirty in the morning.

My father got his ham radio license when he was sixteen. He's seventy-four now. Last winter, I finally asked him to teach me, and he lit up like a Christmas tree.