These are the reasons.

A thunderstorm knocked out power on our whole street one July evening. By seven o'clock, everyone was standing on their porches, staring at their dark houses and their slowly warming freezers.

On a trip to visit my college roommate in Taiwan, she took me to the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival, where thousands of paper lanterns are released into the night sky at once.

Somebody put a small wooden crate of paperbacks at my bus stop on Delancey Avenue with a sign: "Take one. Bring one back. Or don't. Happy reading." Nobody knows who.

My mother-in-law brought a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle to our house for Thanksgiving. It was a picture of a Venetian canal, mostly water and sky. Everyone groaned.

Things I appreciated this afternoon, lying in the hammock in my brother's yard:

My parents have eaten breakfast at Marge's Diner, in the back corner booth, every Saturday since their third date in 1979.

I'm a farmer, and I'm usually up before the sun. Most people think that's the hard part of the job. To me it's the gift.

I worked as a camp counselor for one summer when I was nineteen, and the person I remember most is the cook, Miss Beverly.

My grandmother signed up for a calligraphy class at the senior center at eighty-four and asked me to drive her. I ended up joining too.

My father-in-law, who is from Kerala, wakes up at five every morning to sit on our back porch and watch the morning glories open.

On Saturday mornings I volunteer at a community bike shop where kids can earn a free bike by learning to fix one. I'm a retired machinist, so this is pretty much my dream.

For three weekends in May, my brother and I built a treehouse for our kids in the old maple in his backyard. We had no plans, no experience and very questionable tools.

My grandfather can identify about two hundred birds by their songs alone. Last summer, he decided to teach me.

My dad bought a secondhand tandem kayak for his seventieth birthday and announced that we were going to paddle the slough near the bay. Neither of us had ever kayaked.

My father and I didn't talk much when I was growing up. He worked long hours and I was busy being a teenager. We loved each other, but we didn't really know each other.

Every afternoon at four, an elderly woman sits on the bench outside my office building and feeds the pigeons, talking to them in Polish the whole time.

My winter coat lost a button the size of a quarter, and I couldn't find a match anywhere. A friend sent me to a tiny tailor shop on Clement Street run by a man named Mr. Chen, who has been sewing there since 1978.

When my job transferred me to Pittsburgh this year, my contacts list there was exactly zero. For the first few weeks, the only conversations I had outside the office were with the woman at the bakery on the corner, where I bought a roll every morning.

I started going to the dog park every morning when I adopted Pepper, a nervous terrier mix. I expected to make dog friends. I didn't expect to make people friends.

I took my daughter, Ivy, to her first real concert when she turned eleven: a pop singer she adores, at a big arena two hours away. I had very low expectations for my own enjoyment.