These are the reasons.

We'd planned a camping trip to the mountains this summer. When it was canceled, my kids were heartbroken. So we brought camping to the backyard.

My son is eleven and got a skateboard for his birthday in August. He watched videos for a week and then announced that I needed to learn too, because "you need a hobby, Dad."

I live in a tiny apartment with no yard. This summer I decided I wanted to grow something anyway, so I bought three pots and some soil and lined them up on my fire escape.

My nine-year-old son opened a restaurant this summer. It was in our dining room. It was open on Saturday nights only, and my wife and I were the only customers.

In the spring, everyone on the internet was making a whipped coffee drink: instant coffee, sugar and hot water whipped into a fluffy foam and spooned over cold milk. I made it out of boredom. I kept making it because of my husband.

I live a few miles from a lake that I've swum in every summer since childhood. This year, the beach didn't open until June. By the first warm Sunday, I was itching to get in.

Three of my oldest friends and I have a tradition. Every February, we drive up to a cabin on a frozen lake in northern Minnesota with a wood-fired sauna on the shore. We've been doing it for twenty-two years.

My daughter turned seven in April, the spring when everything was closed. She'd been planning her party since Christmas. When I told her it couldn't happen, she nodded bravely and went to her room. I sat in the kitchen feeling terrible.

That spring, when everyone was staying home, our apartment building got very quiet. You'd hear a door close somewhere, maybe a TV, and that was it.

My family is spread across four countries: Canada, England, Egypt and Malaysia. We used to see each other once every few years, at weddings. This spring, when everyone was stuck at home, my cousin in London started a weekly video game night.

In March, someone in our neighborhood started putting teddy bears in their front windows, so kids out for walks could go on a "bear hunt." Within a week, there were bears everywhere.

I was born on February 29, which means I only get a real birthday every four years. This year, I turned forty. Technically, it was my tenth birthday.

My auntie has had the same sewing machine since 1978. She's made aloha shirts, wedding dresses, quilts and costumes for every hula show at our church. This spring, she turned it into a cloth face covering factory.

On Valentine's Day, my six-year-old son decided to make me breakfast in bed. He told me to stay in my room. I heard a lot of crashing.

After my grandmother moved into assisted living, my mom gave me her recipe box. It's a dented tin box with a faded strawberry on the lid, full of index cards in her loopy handwriting.

My spice drawer is a small archive of everywhere I've been. Saffron from a market in Valencia, in a little tin with a lady on it. Sumac my friend Yusuf brought back from his mother's kitchen in Gaziantep. A jar of smoked paprika I bought on my honeymoon. Chili flakes from a farmers market in Santa Fe where the farmer made me taste six kinds first.

My four-year-old fills his pockets with acorns on every walk. Dozens of them. I find them in the washing machine, under the couch, in my shoes.

My partner writes the grocery lists in our house, and somewhere along the way they started turning into poems. Not good poems. Wonderful, terrible poems.

To the woman who handed me a tulip at the train station on April 3rd:

I moved into a twelfth-floor apartment with my anxious rescue greyhound, Lotte, who had never seen an elevator. The first time the doors opened she backed away like it was a dragon's mouth.