These are the reasons.

When I was eight, my best friend, Lucía, moved from our town in Texas back to Mexico with her family. We wrote letters for a year, then lost touch. I thought about her every so often for thirty years.

My best friend and her husband met in a hardware store in the paint aisle, both reaching for the same can of "Seafoam Green." So, naturally, they got married there.

My wife signed us up for line dancing lessons at the VFW hall for our anniversary. I'm not a dancer. I'm a man who thinks the electric slide is advanced.

My mother has grown roses in the same small backyard for forty years. There are sixty-two bushes. Each one has a name, and each name has a story.

While helping my grandmother clean out her bookshelves, I found a copy of "Charlotte's Web" with a library stamp inside the cover. It was due back at the Elm Street branch library on March 14, 1962.

When I was four, my teddy bear, Mr. Buttons, fell into a storm drain. I was inconsolable. My dad called the non-emergency fire department number, not expecting much.

My family owns a 1967 Ford pickup truck that has been used in every family wedding since my grandparents' in 1968. It's painted robin's egg blue, it doesn't have air conditioning and it only goes about forty miles an hour.

Our library started a free ukulele club this year. They lend you a ukulele and teach you four chords. That's apparently all you need for about a thousand songs.

For years I've whistled the same little tune when I walk out to my car every morning, a few notes from an old song my dad used to whistle.

My mom had a baby this year. I'm twenty-five. Yes, everyone asks.

I'm a retired fisherman, and I live near a small pond in the middle of a suburb. This summer, I noticed kids hanging around the pond with sticks and string, trying to catch something.

My wife and I met at a pancake house in 2015, where we both worked as servers. So, for our wedding cake, we had a stack of pancakes. Thirty of them, three feet tall, with fresh strawberries and whipped cream between the layers, and a little plastic couple on top holding forks.

I grew a pumpkin. One pumpkin. It took four months, three bags of soil, endless watering and a nightly check for squash bugs with a flashlight.

My husband lost his wedding ring while planting tomatoes in our garden in 2018. We searched for weeks. We dug through every inch of soil. Nothing. He bought a replacement and we stopped thinking about it.

When my grandmother moved in with us this year, she brought two suitcases full of saris. Silks in deep red and gold, cottons in soft blue and green, one bright orange that she wore on her wedding day in 1958.

In the courtyard garden outside the children's wing of our local hospital, there's an old maple tree hung with hundreds of ribbons. Kids, parents, nurses and doctors tie them on with wishes written on little paper tags.

Mr. and Mrs. Lindqvist, the elderly Swedish couple on the corner, have the best Halloween house in town. Every October, they transform their yard into an elaborate, completely non-scary "pumpkin village."

It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving at the grocery store, which is the worst possible day to shop. The lines were enormous. Everyone was cranky.

My father has always wanted to sail around the Greek islands. This year, for his seventieth birthday, my siblings and I rented a small sailboat with a captain and took him.

Every November, my Korean mother-in-law makes kimjang, the big winter batch of kimchi. After nine years of marriage, I was finally invited to help.