“The pressure of his touch through my jacket and my sweater was more assurance than any promise ever made to me. It was a touch that said, I have your back and I am here for you. If a girl wasn't careful, she could fall in love with a touch like that.”

“Hao Kan," I said gently, quietly, firmly as if it was a pact between the two of us. She blinked. I wasn't sure if she understood. Or if she believed she was beautiful. So I pointed at her and then to me. And I repeated with utter conviction, "Hao Kan." Those words, my pronouncement, won me the girl's slow nod. I nodded back. And when she smiled, wide and open, I tell you, there was nothing more beautiful that that.”

“But the truly brilliant geocachers?""Yeah?" he says. "What about us?""They know it by its real name. Terra Firma.""Terra Firma," he repeats. At last, he slips his backpack off his shoulder. I know what he's looking for.I take a breath. "You don't need your GPS for this cache."His eyes don't move off mine; he's watching me so carefully. "You don't, huh?""Nope," I say.Some things are meant to be kept - what you learn from experiences good or bad, smiles from an orphaned girl, a boy who is your compass pointing to your True North. So I look at Jacob full in the face with nothing obscuring him. Or me. And then I step closer to him. And closer. And closer yet."Here I am," I tell him. "Here I am.”

“Without looking at Jacob, I said slowly, 'Well, it seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite.' I chance a glance at him. He was watching me intently. No glaze in his eyes. So I continued more bravely: 'It connect you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise on a clear blue day of the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly'--my hands escaped their tight grip in my lap, and now my fingers splayed wide like fireworks in the air--'you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.”

“What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I've ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.”

“I preferred my brand of beauty where Norah was more beautiful than any bimbette, and Mom was beautiful whether sized extra-small or extra-large. Where Peony could look at herself in the mirror and murmur, wow, look at me. Just look at me.”

“You don't need a geochache for this one.""You don't, huh?""Nope.. here I am. Here I am.”