These are the reasons.

In January, someone at my office started a "mug exchange." Everyone brought in a mug from home, and we put them all in a box and drew one at random. You keep the mug you draw for a month, then switch again.

I was waiting for the bus on a gray Monday morning, in the rain, along with six other grumpy commuters. Then a little girl of about five, in a yellow raincoat, started dancing.

Six of us from my old job started a group chat in 2019 called "Soup," because the first message was a photo of a soup someone had made. Five years and three job changes later, it's still going, and it's still called Soup.

My aunt has a jar of sea glass on every windowsill of her cottage in Maine. She's been collecting it for forty years. This August, I stayed with her for two weeks and finally understood why.

For my birthday, my sister gave me a glassblowing class at a small studio near the river. I'd never seen it done. I didn't know I would fall in love.

My husband has two left feet. He has always had two left feet. So when I signed us up for Argentine tango lessons for our thirty-fifth anniversary, he looked at me as if I'd asked him to join the circus.

Every summer, our town holds a rubber duck race on the river. Thousands of yellow rubber ducks, each with a number, are dumped off the bridge, and they float downstream to the finish line at the park.

For my fortieth birthday, I decided to learn Italian. My grandparents spoke it at home, but I only ever learned a few words, mostly about food.

Our street has a group text called "Who Has a Ladder?" It started when a neighbor needed one to rescue a cat from a roof. It's become the most useful thing in my life.