These are the reasons.

I was a double dutch champion when I was eleven. Two long ropes, turning in opposite directions, and you jump in between them. I hadn't done it in thirty years. Then, this July, I saw two girls on my block trying to jump with one old rope and a lot of frustration.

I moved from Melbourne to Maryland in 2019 for my wife's job. Nobody warned me about Brood X.

My son is thirteen. In May, he came home from school with a kendama, a wooden Japanese toy shaped like a hammer with a ball on a string. The idea is to swing the ball up and catch it on one of the cups, or on the spike.

I held my first grandchild for the first time last Tuesday. Her name is Lila. She weighs seven pounds, two ounces, and she has my mother's chin.

Our city has a minor league baseball team. Nobody's quite sure what the mascot is supposed to be; it's some kind of fuzzy green fish. Last year, the games were played without fans. This April, they opened the stadium again, and my daughter and I went on opening night.

My mother is Swedish and made cardamom buns every Saturday when I was growing up. The whole house smelled like butter and spice. This April, my eight-year-old daughter asked if we could make them together.

For years, my daughter asked for chickens. For years, I said no. This March, I finally said yes, mostly because I'd run out of reasons.

Our town library had been closed to the public for a year. You could order books online and pick them up in a paper bag at the door, but you couldn't go in. This March, it finally reopened.

My nephew Theo is five, and he is the most enthusiastic person I know.

In February, my husband and I cross-country skied six miles through the forest to a backcountry hut in the mountains. We'd never done anything like it. We packed sleeping bags, food and a thermos of soup on our backs.

Our town holds a snow sculpture contest every January, and this year, my sisters and I entered for the first time. Each team gets an eight-foot block of packed snow and two days to turn it into something.

This was a long, strange year. I missed my family terribly, and phone calls started to feel the same, week after week.

Every December, my friends and I have a cookie exchange party, with eggnog and Christmas music. This year, we couldn't get together. So we did a doorstep version.

This Halloween, my neighbor and I wanted the kids to trick-or-treat but keep their distance. So we built a candy chute.

In October, our church turned its parking lot into a drive-in movie theater. They rented a giant inflatable screen and a projector, and broadcast the sound over an FM radio station. The first movie was The Princess Bride.

I'm a wedding photographer, and this spring, all my weddings were postponed. I was restless. So I started walking around my neighborhood with my camera, offering to take pictures of families on their front porches, from the sidewalk, for free.

I roller skated every Friday night at the rink when I was thirteen. Then I grew up, and my skates went into a box. This spring, I bought a new pair of roller skates off the internet: white, with pink wheels. I'm fifty-two.

I'm an accountant. I hadn't painted anything since grade school. But in March, I bought a cheap set of watercolors and a pad of paper and promised myself I would paint one small picture every day, no matter how bad it was.

I've always done our daughter's hair in the mornings. This summer, I took a new job with an early shift, and suddenly my husband was in charge. He had never braided anything in his life.

In May, a fox dug a den under the shed at the back of our yard. A week later, four tiny kits came tumbling out into the sunlight.