These are the reasons.

On a trip to the Oregon coast, I spent a morning on the pier watching an old fisherman reel in rockfish one after another. He must have caught twenty.

I bought a peach at a roadside stand in Georgia this August. One peach. It cost a dollar.

This one starts in a hospital, but it's a happy story, I promise. My dad works as a security guard at the children's hospital, and every December a high school choir comes to sing in the lobby.

My brother texts me one terrible joke every day. He's been doing it since 2014. I've received approximately 1,800 terrible jokes.

My son tried to whistle for most of second grade. He practiced at breakfast, in the bath, in the back seat of the car, producing nothing but air and spit.

I repainted my front door yellow last weekend. Sunflower yellow. My neighbors' doors are all brown or gray.

After a twelve-hour shift at the warehouse, my coworker Bao and I stop at the same noodle shop on Fourth Street. It's open until two. The owner's daughter does her homework at the corner table, and the TV plays soap operas with the sound off.

My twin daughters, age seven, opened a lemonade stand on our corner in July. They charged fifty cents a cup. By noon they had made four dollars and given away about thirty free cups to "people who looked thirsty."

I love the sound rain makes on the skylight above my desk. It's like a crowd of tiny people applauding very politely. Today it rained all afternoon, and I worked slower than usual, on purpose, because I didn't want it to end.

My grandpa taught me to drive on the gravel road behind his farm in a pickup older than my mother. I was twelve. I could barely see over the dashboard.

Dear Mr. Alvarez,

On a Tuesday afternoon in May, traffic stopped completely in the parking lot of our grocery store. A mother duck was leading eleven ducklings from the drainage pond to the creek on the other side.

We planned our wedding for months. Outdoor ceremony by the lake, white chairs in rows, string lights in the trees. The forecast said sunny.

My best friend Imani asked me to give a toast at her wedding. I'm a terrible public speaker. My hands shake holding a coffee cup in a meeting.

Our apartment building has a little roof deck nobody uses because of the pigeons. In August, during the Perseid meteor shower, I put up a sign in the lobby: "Shooting stars on the roof, 11 p.m. Bring a blanket."

On a trip to Nova Scotia, my husband and I stopped at a tiny lighthouse museum run by a woman in her eighties whose father had been the keeper there for thirty years.

Every October, my three roommates and I drive out to the Hendersons' farm for the corn maze, and every year we get spectacularly lost.

My father is seventy-six and has resisted emojis for years. "I have words," he said. "I don't need little cartoons."

My great-grandmother is ninety-three, and she has a rule: ice cream before lunch on Saturdays.

A girl of about ten moved into the duplex across the street this spring, and our sidewalk has never been the same.