"What's the farthest place you've gone to?"
She leaned back and took a hesitating sip of tea. The cup chimed like a tiny bell when she set it back on its saucer. "My husband and I drove to California for our honeymoon. I saw the ocean for the first time on that trip. I remember being on the coastal road and pushing my face against the window to get it all in. And then we were at the beach, and I was standing there with the surf beating my ankles, and my husband--he was always the poetical sort, you know--he started talking about that water going back out to Hawaii and Samoa and on and on. To Australia maybe, or Japan. That same water lapping against my feet.
"'Up into the air, too,' he told me. 'It will touch you and then disappear, come back as a cloud up as high as the air can get.' I've gone to some far places, but the things I've touched have gone farther than I'll ever go." She exhaled in a murmuring sigh, fiddling with the handle of the cup. "I wish they wouldn't go quite so far. Or if they did, I wish that afterward they'd come back to me."