These are the reasons.

On a trip to Kyoto, I wandered down a narrow alley in the rain and found a tiny tea shop with six seats. It was run by an elderly woman who didn't speak English and a very fat orange cat who sat on the counter.

My elderly neighbor, Mrs. Petrova, walks very slowly with a cane and waves at me every morning from her porch. I'd lived next to her for three years before I learned she'd danced with the Bolshoi Ballet in the 1960s.

When my grandparents downsized, they gave me their grandfather clock, which has stood in the front hall of every house they've lived in since 1952. It's taller than me and chimes every quarter hour.

My grandfather gave me his old wool coat this winter, saying he'd "outgrown it, sideways." I wore it to work the first day and put my hands in the pockets.

I volunteer once a week teaching gardening at the minimum-security correctional facility outside our town. It's not something I ever expected to do. It's become one of my favorite things in my life.

My son is four months old and last night he laughed for the first time.

At the state park campground this summer, an old man in the next site invited everyone to his campfire at dusk. He said he had "some stories."

In Seattle this spring, I spent an early morning at Pike Place, watching the fishmongers throw salmon across the counter, catching them with a flourish and a shout. I'd seen it on TV. In person, it's even better.

Our dog, Penny, slipped her collar during a thunderstorm in April and ran off into the woods behind our house. We searched for three days. The whole neighborhood helped. Kids made posters. A man I'd never met drove around with his windows down calling her name.

My younger brother is Deaf, and at my wedding this year he gave a toast in American Sign Language, with our cousin interpreting out loud.

Our elementary school has a garden behind the gym, and for the past six years it's been run by a volunteer named Mr. Tanaka, who turned ninety this spring.

In July, my neighbor hung a white bedsheet between two trees in her backyard and set up a projector borrowed from the school. She put a sign on the sidewalk: "Movie night! 9 p.m. Bring a chair."

My family moved to a small town in New Mexico this year, and in December, our neighbor knocked on the door with a stack of brown paper bags and a bucket of sand. "Luminarias," she said. "Everyone on the street does it. You'll see."

My granddaughter stayed with me for a week in December. On the first afternoon, it was snowing, and she was bored. So I taught her to make paper snowflakes, the way my mother taught me in Kyiv when I was a little girl.

My mother and I signed up for a wreath-making class at a greenhouse on the last Saturday in November. It was her idea. She's seventy-four and has been making the same wreath from a kit for twenty years, and she wanted to "get serious."

In January, my grandmother discovered Wordle. She is eighty-seven and lives in Florida. I'm twenty-four and live in Seattle. Every single morning since then, she has texted me her score before I'm out of bed.

For thirty-two years, my parents have hosted Thanksgiving. This year, the turkey was my job, in my own house, which I bought in June, after eight years of saving.

My neighbor Zack is an engineer, and in October, he decided to build a trebuchet in his backyard. A trebuchet is a medieval siege weapon, the kind that throws rocks at castle walls. He wanted to throw pumpkins.

It started as a way to fill quiet Sunday afternoons. I found a simple bread recipe online and figured, how hard could it be?

This fall, I hiked a three-hundred-mile section of the Appalachian Trail, from Damascus to Waynesboro. I'm sixty-one. I've wanted to do it since I was twenty.