1.    When you get off route 73, take a left at the little green house, the one with the white metal flamingos on the screen door.
2.    Come to think of it, those flamingos might not be there anymore but I'll bet you five bucks they are because when has anything ever changed around here?
3.    That road'll jog you down a-ways, down a big, big hill and past the Odd Lot and the boarded-up Shell station and then a corner tavern called Gulpy's.
4.    If you keep on that road, past the point you're even sure it's a road anymore, just a little bit after that it narrows down and the pavement runs out, and if you look carefully you'll see a little pond off to the right, with a worn-out gravel turnaround and a bench.
5.    Just past that bench, you'll see a big old willow tree with a hollowed-out spot, right through its middle, and one long, slender, perfect branch that stretches way out over the pond and curves its hand down at the end, like this, so the tips of it almost just nearly touch the water, but not quite.
6.    That's the branch, one winter,
7.    I swear that winter the pond finally just took mercy on that one poor branch, for all its trying, and leapt right up and grabbed the branch by the tips of its fingers—
8.    those fragile little ones at the very, very end, you know?
9.    And they froze together that way, that pond and that branch, holding onto one another so tight—one of them reaching up so hard and the other one bending down so tenderly—
10.    and they just locked right together like that, just for that one winter, for three whole months, like a great big archer's bow.
11.   
12.    That winter me and a girl called Jenny sat on the top of that bent-over branch every day.
13.    Jenny was the kind of girl who smoked cigarettes and had friends,
14.    and she'd light one up for me and tell me things,
15.    and she'd let me tell her things, too, and we'd sit there and look on up the hill at the old side-by-side brown-brick apartment buildings that we lived in, and the old gray building where we both went to school, and the Odd Lot and the tavern where our mothers worked.
16.    She showed me how to turn my smoke into puffy clouds in the cold.
17.    And we laughed together about what would happen when the thaw came, and that pond wouldn't be strong enough to hold on anymore.
18.    How our branch would go flying, and fling us right out of there like a catapult.

How far we would go.

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