These are the reasons.

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.

My son is a freshman in college, three states away. At 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday in October, my phone rang. I sat straight up in bed, heart pounding.

I coach a soccer team of seven-year-olds. We are called the Purple Lightning, which the kids voted on, and we have not won a single game this season.

A flyer on the rec center bulletin board showed a man in a sparkly shirt mid-spin, under the words BEGINNER SALSA, TUESDAYS. I wanted to be that man, so I wrote my name on the sign-up sheet.

On a camping trip in Maine, I got up at five a.m. to pee and saw a moose standing in the lake about forty feet from our tent.

My grandfather and I have played mini golf at the same course on the boardwalk every summer since I was six. It has a windmill, a pirate ship and a giant fiberglass octopus whose tentacles block the hole on the twelfth.