These are the reasons.

I got my first real paycheck at sixteen, bagging groceries at the Food King. It was $137.42 for two weeks. I felt like a millionaire.

My neighbor Mr. Haddad is eighty and grows figs, grapes, mint, eggplant and an astonishing number of zucchini in a backyard the size of a parking spot.

My son turned five in March, which in our house means one thing: his own library card.

On New Year's Day I put an empty pickle jar on the kitchen counter with a pen and a stack of scrap paper. The rule: whenever something good happens, no matter how small, write it down and drop it in.

I bought a bell for my bike for three dollars at a hardware store. It's shaped like a ladybug. Its ring is ridiculously cheerful.

At eleven o'clock on a Tuesday, I found my teenage son and his younger sister in the living room, building a fort out of a giant pile of clean, unfolded laundry.

Every weekday morning on the 7:12 commuter train, a group of women knits in the third car. I noticed them for months before one of them offered me a spare pair of needles.

My grandfather served on a navy ship in the 1950s, and this spring there was a reunion for the surviving crew in Norfolk. He couldn't drive that far anymore, so I took him. Nine hours each way.

On Sunday mornings, the bakery near my apartment props its door open and plays jazz records. The line usually runs out onto the sidewalk.

My grandkids came to stay for a long weekend in November, and it rained the whole time. By Saturday afternoon, we had run out of board games, cookies and patience.

My partner and I do the Sunday crossword together in bed, one pen between us, which causes about four arguments per puzzle.

My daughter is three, and today she picked her first strawberry from our little container garden on the balcony.