Some people bring home magnets, key chains and maps from their travels; I bring home accessories. Floral scarves, beaded headbands, colorful hats, kitschy coin purses. But more than anything else, I bring home jewelry.

Not crazy, need-a-bodyguard, can’t-check-my-luggage jewelry. Fun jewelry. Some of my frill is extra, but most of it isn’t; some of it is pricey, most of it is not — a pair of almond-shaped silver studs from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul that cost a few lira; a pair of triangular gold dangling earrings bought from a store in the center of Athens on the day I found out I was accepted to graduate school; a pair of blue circular earrings from the Malcolm Shabazz market in Harlem some 20 blocks away from my apartment (local travel, am I right?).

Some has been bought for me by friends on their own trips. Over the years, my friend Ari has given me earrings from Uganda, Ethiopia and South Africa, as well as a necklace from Kenya and a bracelet from Paris. Oluseyi gave me a necklace made of the black, white, red and green paper beads that are popular in French Guiana. Selina gave me sparkling teal earrings from Istanbul when I graduated from college. And it was a long purple wooden necklace, given to me the summer before my senior year of high school by my friend Imani after her trip to Spain, that first had me daydreaming about when I too would visit the Mediterranean.

If this all sounds like a lot, you have to understand that everything about my sense of style is maximalist: I love bright colors, feathers, fringe, animal print — typically not all together, but sometimes … all together. Let’s just say that I prefer to ignore Coco Chanel’s advice to take one accessory off before leaving the house.

But my proclivity for holding onto ornaments doesn’t exactly conform to an age where a Marie Kondo-endorsed sense of minimalism is in vogue. There’s also the practical matter that my apartment is a 400-square foot studio, and one woman’s cheerful collection of objects is another’s sanity-stretching clutter. Sometimes I am both of those women.

In March, as quarantine began, like many others, I set some personal goals. I promised myself that I would declutter my closet. I would use this extra time at home to tidy up and redecorate, to care for my plants and to finally organize my jewelry. I would accept that I will not, in fact, turn the remaining earring of a lost pair into a necklace or a ring. I would let go of the items that I’ve outgrown and haven’t worn in years, along with the earrings that have been given to me that I could never work up the courage to re-gift out of fear that the person who gave them to me would one day ask if I still owned them.

As I confronted my collection, I realized that my reluctance to get rid of jewelry over the years has been less to do with personal laziness or a maximalist style ethos, and more to do with what these souvenirs give me. Stuck at home, going through my jewelry has been an escape to past adventures and a reminder of friends who are now far away. Each time I wear certain items, I’m transported to a certain city and moment in my life.

The chunky, oversize blue, turquoise and aquamarine beaded necklace that my friend Paola picked out for me from her mother’s store in Abruzzo, transports me to the final weeks of our senior year of college, a time of trepidation and joy. Days after Paola gave me that necklace we submitted our theses, and soon after our parents arrived in Rome. When I wear it, I am right back in those heady days of feeling like the world was opening up in front of us.

The sequined navy, silver and black band that doubles as a headband and necklace reminds me of romping through Paris in the winter at 21. The neon rainbow fringe earrings from Marbella remind me of my best friend’s wedding there a few years ago. A silver floral pendant was a gift from my primary school dorm mates, given to me days before I left Zimbabwe for the United States. Friends who recently visited Lisbon gave me a pair of winged gold earrings created by a designer whose work I stumbled upon years ago. Those earrings remind me of the friends who gave them to me, but they also remind me of the day I spent exploring Lisbon, and how I tripped and fell on the front step of a boutique. I got up, walked in and came out with new earrings and a necklace.

One of the reasons we travel is to connect with other people. In years of shopping for jewelry around the world I’ve always come away with more than just a new bauble: I’ve learned about the history of a town while having a bracelet made; about the customs of a country while trying on rings. I’ve met fascinating artists and business owners, people who shared their stories — and their favorite local haunts, the kind that you’d never find in a guidebook — with me. I’ve also made lasting friendships.

Years after I left Italy, I met a colleague who had a silver ring inspired by the Roman aqueducts that for 500 years brought water into the city’s center. She’d studied in Italy about a decade before I did and upon visiting Rome with her children years later, she bought the ring. When I returned to Rome, I went to the same store and bought the same ring in gold. And so the ring has come to encapsulate something slightly different: that Rome, stoic and unchanging, has imprinted its effects on new generations of visitors and inhabitants, uniting us all in shared reverence.

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Strawberries may grace the supermarket produce aisle all year round, but the juicy, brightly colored varieties that come around in late May and June are almost a different species, altogether soft and delicate and needing to be devoured as quickly as possible. You can smell their floral, candylike aroma at the market before even laying eyes on them.

Still, all strawberries have a place in the kitchen. The key is to know which to use when. Out-of-season berries are great for baked pies and cakes, since cooking or macerating them concentrates their flavor. But those in-season beauties are best used gently, in applications that accentuate their essence with as little heat and manipulation as possible.

That’s why, when strawberries are at their peak, it’s time to make a fresh strawberry pie.

This one starts with an easy, press-in cookie crust. Using store-bought shortbread minimizes the amount of time the oven has to be on in the summer, and the buttery cookies create a pairing reminiscent of strawberry shortcake. Keep in mind that some brands of shortbread have more sugar than others and may require a little less sweetener in the crust mixture. Graham crackers or chocolate wafers would be nice, too.

Inside is simply a mixture of fresh, quartered strawberries and a quick jam of cooked strawberries, strawberry preserves and cornstarch. Some recipes rely on strawberry gelatin to hold it all together, but, here, real strawberry is the star: The preserves help bind the filling, while adding even more fruit flavor. A quarter-cup of cornstarch may seem like a lot, but you’ll need it with those height-of-season gushers to ensure that the final dessert is sliceable. (Deep-dish fruit pies made with strawberries may taste good, but they can cascade like a burst dam when sliced.)

Finished with a cloud of lightly sweetened, freshly whipped cream, this pie is a sight to behold. All in all, its simplicity makes fresh strawberry pie so special. The fruit has been gussied up, but only enough to allow it to shine.

Recipe: Fresh Strawberry Pie

Chiedza Mushayamunda and Matthew Hooker went through “a range of emotions,” as Mr. Hooker put it, when they realized their long-planned May 30 wedding would have to be severely downsized because of the coronavirus.

The wedding was to have taken place at the Millennium Center in Winston-Salem, N.C, with more than 200 guests, including family and friends from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, Canada and Britain.

The couple, concerned mainly with the health and safety of their guests, were still married May 30. But the ceremony, and the reception, took place mostly with immediate family on the grounds of Summit School — a scenic outdoor space in Winston-Salem, and the school the bride attended from junior kindergarten through ninth grade.

Among those in attendance were Ms. Mushayamunda’s parents, Yvonne and Dereck Mushayamunda (originally from Zimbabwe and now residing in Winston-Salem), as well as her grandparents, and Mr. Hooker’s parents, Kay A. Hooker and Phillip Hooker of Gaithersburg, Md.

The Rev. Jon Hauser, an associate minister of Pinedale Christian Church in Winston-Salem, led the ceremony, with the Rev. Colin Seager, the senior pastor at Derwood Bible Church in Derwood, Md., taking part.

The couple were able to more than double their guest list as North Carolina moved to Phase 2 of its reopening on May 22, raising the number of people who could gather in an outdoor group to 25 from 10.

“We were watching for that decision like a hawk,” Mr. Hooker said. “It was some good news for sure.”

The couple, who first met in September 2018 through a community group at Two Cities Church in Winston-Salem, desperately needed to hear some good news.

“Our invitations were sent out, our guest list confirmed, and then we had to do a one-eighty and pull the brakes,” said Mr. Hooker, 24, who graduated from Thomas Edison State University in Trenton, N.J., and received a law degree summa cum laude this month from Wake Forest.

“This has certainly been a very frustrating and, at times, a very confusing experience for us,” said Mr. Hooker, who will begin a judicial clerkship in August with Adam M. Conrad, a special superior court judge for complex business cases at the North Carolina business court in Charlotte.

“We got engaged in August 2019, and since that day we have put so many hours into planning this wedding celebration, and then to lose control and see it all fall apart, well, that was really kind of rough.”

Ms. Mushayamunda, also 24, said that she too “was incredibly disappointed the minute I found out that we were not going to get the wedding of our dreams.”

“At first, I freaked out,” said Ms. Mushayamunda, a marketing specialist at Javara, a clinical research company based in Winston-Salem. She graduated from Wofford College, and recently accepted an offer of admission to pursue an M.B.A. at Wake Forest in the fall of 2021.

“But I soon became less angry, because it was about remembering the reason I was marrying Matthew in the first place, she said. “It wasn’t because we were getting married at a fancy venue, it was simply because I loved him.”

Looking ahead optimistically, the couple have set a new date, Aug. 15, for a celebration ceremony that would bring back most of their 200-plus original guests to the Millennium Center, “assuming it would be safe by then for such a gathering to take place,” Mr. Hooker said.

Steve Burke saw Lillie McDonough walk into the bar where he was playing bass with a Rolling Stones cover band in 2014, and he was hoping she was the woman he had been told to look for. Ms. McDonough’s uncle, who had been impressed by his playing days earlier, sent her to meet him.

“She was this beautiful girl in big glasses and all this knitwear, and I wasn’t sure, but I had a sense that she might be the niece,” he said. (The uncle was trying to help her find a bass player for a project to help her get accepted to a program at New York University.)

But before he learned whether she was the niece, his music slid off his stand onto the club floor and she rushed over to pick it up. The attraction was undeniable.

“It was instant,” he said.

Ms. McDonough, 31, and Mr. Burke, 30, of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, have been building a life and their music credentials together since that moment.

Ms. McDonough — whose uncle, Kevin Wells, had indeed heard Mr. Burke’s playing at the bar and told her to go listen — was accepted to the film composing program at N.Y.U. in 2015 and now is an adjunct professor in screen scoring at N.Y.U. Steinhardt. Mr. Burke leads a jazz band and works in the wedding industry as a bassist and sound engineer.

They were engaged on July 18, 2019, on a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine, after three years of living together in Brooklyn. Ms. McDonough was roused at 4 a.m. so Mr. Burke’s proposal would coincide with sunrise.

“I was actually sobbing into my pancakes,” she said. “I was so surprised, even though we had been talking about getting married. My emotions caught up with me.” They planned a May 9 wedding for 200 at Cedar Lakes Estate, a former summer camp site in Port Jervis, N.Y.

By the end of March, though, they started sensing an alternate plan was in order. “Our original thought was to postpone, but that felt a little strange because no one knew what was going to happen,” she said. “October wasn’t guaranteed, either. And knowing that, it started to hurt.”

After a few long talks, “we came to the conclusion that we just wanted to be married,” she said. They settled on their original wedding date, May 9, and her father’s house in Gloucester, Mass., where they have been camping out during the pandemic, as a venue. Their friend Kristi Nelson, ordained through the Universal Life Church, agreed to officiate. Ms. McDonough chose a dress she had left in a closet at her father’s house years earlier and enlisted a friend who designs lingerie to tailor it. Mr. Burke wore the clothes he picked out for the original wedding, a dark blue suit with a purple linen bow tie.

In late April, Afrik Armando, the Philadelphia-based photographer whom Ms. McDonough had hired for the Port Jervis wedding, and Joanna Nollet, a New Jersey-based florist, had called Mr. Burke. “They wanted to surprise Lillie,” he said.

On the night before the wedding, Mr. Armando and Ms. Nollet drove together to Massachusetts. “Wearing gloves, masks and a ton of spray sanitizer, we set everything up while they slept,” Mr. Armando said. “We had just decided that we both adore this couple, because they’re some of the kindest humans we’ve ever met.”

When Ms. McDonough walked downstairs that morning, she had cause to cry into her pancakes a second time. The house was filled with magnolias, lilacs, peonies and professional camera equipment. “It was beyond sweet,” she said. “Just unbelievably kind.” TAMMY La GORCE

Morgan Clark walked into the bedroom of his fiancé, Elizabeth Reilly, on March 18 and found her sobbing.

The devastating effects of the coronavirus forced the couple to move their originally scheduled wedding date up to March 22, from May 8.

And they had to change the location of the church, from the Incarnation Anglican Church in Tallahassee, Fla., where the couple met in June 2017, to the Christchurch Anglican in Montgomery, Ala., where Mr. Clark is an associate priest.

They also reduced the number of already invited guests, to 10 from 250.

“The saddest thing is that it suddenly dawns on you that you can’t be with all the people you love the most,” Ms. Reilly said. “I saw visions of my flower girls peeking over pews, and of my mom’s steady arm extended to walk me down the aisle, vanish before my eyes.

“I grieved, and then chastised myself for grieving over such simple pleasures amid a world full of loss,” she added. “But once I got past that, it was like, well, lets just see if we can make some lemonade out of these corona lemons.”

Ms. Reilly and Mr. Clark, both only children raised by their mothers, Mary Reilly and Robin Clark, reached out to explain their situation and asked for their blessings to move forward with their new wedding plans. (Both of their fathers died when they were young children.)

Each mother approved, and slowly and creatively, church officials and parishioners from Christchurch Anglican in Montgomery, most of whom had never met Ms. Reilly or Mr. Clark, came together as one family, all working to give the bride and groom a most magical wedding day.

Though the pews were empty as the couple stood before the Rev. Andrew Rowell, an Anglican priest who performed the ceremony, the church’s youth minister livestreamed the event, which had 660 viewers on YouTube.

Through a series of fortunate events, the groom’s best man lived in Montgomery and the bride’s maid of honor was able to be in town from Tallahassee.

The church provided an organist and a singer, and some of the women in the community designed beautiful bouquets and set flowers at the front of the church.

Inside, vases overflowed with blush and blue blooms, the couple’s original wedding colors, courtesy of a local florist.

They were gifted a wedding cake, and friends decorated their car with balloons from Publix and strung cans off the bumper.

“It seemed like the whole world, or at least our small corner of it, was just aching for something to celebrate,” Ms. Reilly said, “and we were happy to oblige.”

Mary Noelle Guido and Nicholas Raymond McMurray realized they were Buckeyes through and through when they met in 2014 at a rooftop party in Washington.

They grew up 30 minutes from each other in Ohio — she in Brecksville and he in Euclid — and both graduated from Ohio State cum laude. He also went to the St. Ignatius School in Cleveland, just like her father and where her brother is a rising sophomore.

“Mary just moved to D.C.,” said Mr. McMurray, 31, who had already been there a year when she arrived just after graduation as an intern in Michelle Obama’s office.

Mr. McMurray, who goes by Niko, is now the nuclear program director at ClearPath, a clean energy nonprofit organization based in Washington.

Ms. Guido, 28, is the director of global events for the International Women’s Forum, a membership group in Washington of 7,000 professional women from 33 countries.

They saw each other, as friends while dating other people, in group settings — Ohio State football game watch parties, trying out a different pizza place each month with a group of friends and apple picking in Virginia.

She said he was “ a friendly, affable guy. He’s the friend who always wants to help you move.” In May 2015, he invited her to another rooftop party and about a month later, when Ms. Guido was moving to an apartment on the top floor of a four-floor walk-up, he brought his car around to help her.

It wasn’t until the following year, in December, that they each noted a slight romantic blip when just the two of them went to the Washington Zoo to see the Christmas lights (they each used to see those sort of lights at the Cleveland Zoo growing up) and had stopped at a bar before for drinks.

”It definitely felt like a date, but wasn’t a date,” he said, and both agreed it was merely the romance of twinkling lights and gin.

Later that month it dawned on Mr. McMurray that he really did enjoy hanging out with her and bounced the idea of asking her out off a couple of friends.

“‘Just call her,’” he recalled one of them saying. He did and asked her to a concert.

“He’s my friend,” Ms. Guido recalled thinking. “I was so thrown off,’’ she said. “I was just going to give it a shot. I really did enjoy his company.”

A couple of days before the concert (the Arkells, a Canadian indie rock band), Ms. Guido asked him to join her at the fitness studio for a high intensity workout class, and after he walked her home they had their first kiss.

He proposed April 7, 2018 on the Ohio State campus during a Sphinx honor society weekend (they both are members), and in June helped his fiancée move into their new apartment.

They were married May 30 in a self-uniting ceremony at Tregaron Conservancy in Washington. They had originally planned to wed at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Columbus, Ohio, on that date, before the coronavirus outbreak.

The very misstep that everyone in the electronic age perhaps fears most — sending a message to the wrong recipient — is what brought Victoria Herrmann and Eli Keene together.

Both were working at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is based in Washington. She was a junior fellow in the energy program, focused on transportation and climate change in cities, and he was the program coordinator for Central Asia, primarily working from an office in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on regional energy and migration issues.

In the summer of 2013, he was on a stint in Washington when Dr. Herrmann, volunteering backstage at a Fringe Festival production, sent out a request for help via a Facebook message to a friend whose name is Elie.

Except it went to Eli instead.

“I had spilled paint and I needed some help, and knew that he was in the audience and asked if he could come backstage,” she said.

“It was just such a funny message,” Mr. Keene said. “I just kind of responded, ‘There’s got to be a story there.’ Kind of immediately, it felt like there was chemistry.”

“After that, there was a lot of flirting that ensued on Facebook Messenger,” she said. “We met up for coffee, and then went out to a bar for a real date.” Their first kiss happened on the walk back from the bar.

Mr. Keene said he fell in love quickly. “I had never met anyone like her before, and I knew right away,” he said. “She’s brilliant, but in this just really special way. She has to be the best communicator I’ve ever met in my life, and she’s totally comfortable talking about anything in front of anyone, whether it’s us having coffee, or talking to mayors or senators.”

She quickly came to appreciate that their interests were aligned. “We not only can cook up pasta and go on long walks, he pushes me to be better — an overall better person,” she said.

The fall after they met, Dr. Herrmann, now 29, left to study for a master’s degree in international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, where she was a Fulbright scholar. Mr. Keene, now 31, returned to Kazakhstan and then, in January, persuaded his boss to let him work remotely so that he could join Dr. Herrmann in Ottawa.

The following year, he went to Paris for a stint at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and she joined him there for a few months, having completed the master’s degree. In the fall, he returned to New York to begin law school at Columbia, and she went to England to begin work on a doctoral degree in geography at Cambridge University.

There was another summer abroad — Hungary this time — and then she moved to New York. In 2017, the couple returned to Washington, where she is now an assistant research professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. She is also a National Geographic Explorer and the managing director of the Arctic Institute, a Washington-based research and policy network focused on Arctic security issues. He is an associate in the energy and infrastructure group at the Washington office of Clifford Chance, a British law firm.

In 2018, he tagged along on a trip to New Orleans, and the two wandered the city talking about their relationship. “At the end of it, I think there was this moment of, ‘OK. Let’s get married,’” he said.

The couple had planned a May 8 wedding at Riverside on the Potomac, an events space in Leesburg, Va., but because of the coronavirus, they plan to host a one-year celebration of their marriage there in 2021.

They married May 30, under a District of Columbia law that allows couples to self-unite. The ceremony was at the home of Michael Atkins and Susan Crockin, an uncle and aunt of the groom, with the couple’s other family members watching on a video link. NINA REYES

Dr. Ellen Panzer and Alan Schwartz were married May 19 in the parking lot of the Monroe Township Municipal Courthouse in Monroe, N.J. But as the bride noted, “In our minds we were already married, we just needed to make it official.”

Dr. Panzer, 59, a sports physician for New York City high school sports based in Forest Hills, Queens, and Mr. Schwartz, 63, who owns a business refurbishing automobile interiors, maintained a safe distance from a wedding party that included George Boyd, a municipal judge in Monroe, and their two witnesses, Susan Panzer, the bride’s sister, and Barry Schwartz, the groom’s brother.

The bride’s parents, Barbara Panzer and Morty Panzer of Floral Park, Queens, were unable to attend because of threats posed by the coronavirus. But they had a chance to congratulate the newlyweds at a Zoom after party created by the bride’s three daughters, Leah Herz, Rachel Herz, and Rebecca Herz

“We were meant to be together,” said Mr. Schwartz, whose relationship status with Dr. Panzer has changed numerous times since they were first neighbors, then friends, growing up in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. She lived on East 104th Street and he on East 87th.

The years sailed by and they became really good friends who married other people, though Mr. Schwartz did maintain a patient-doctor relationship that included Mr. Schwartz’s wife and his daughter, Tamara.

In the late 1990s, Dr. Panzer left Canarsie for Hewett, N.Y., but she and Mr. Schwartz, who eventually moved to New Jersey, kept in touch.

Their unplanned journey to each other then went through some painful places. In 2013, Dr. Panzer, who had been married for 20 years, got divorced.

Three years ago, Mr. Schwartz, who lives in Monroe, became a widower.

“I’ve gone through a lot over the years and I have realized that you just have to live your life,” Mr. Schwartz said. “You cannot let things you have no control over dictate how you’re going to live. You have to deal with it and move on.”

Mr. Schwartz remained friends with Dr. Panzer — they are both outdoors enthusiasts — and about two years ago, they turned a serious corner.

“We both knew we wanted to get married again, and to each other,” Dr. Panzer said.

“When we first reached out to Monroe Township in late March to inquire about marriage licenses, their office was closed,” she said. “But a real nice woman there named Patty said, ‘We will put you on the list.’”

Dr. Panzer thanked her and received another call from Monroe Township a few days later telling her that she and Mr. Schwartz would indeed be the first couple to get married in Monroe Township since its city clerk’s office began holding civil services again (though only on Tuesdays).

“I have 2,500 friends on Facebook,” Dr. Panzer said. “I’m very involved in community stuff, so the minute we posted the wedding, we had over a thousand people wishing us well. And then it hit television news about an hour and a half later, and we were deluged with many, many more calls from people telling us that at a time when all they keep hearing is bad things, our story was very uplifting to them.”