(This is the opening of a story about two boys—who appear as college students in another story—deciding to take a risk.)  According to Lee and Jay, it never snowed—well, sure it snowed, it had snowed all night, a good six inches on the ground—but still, it hardly ever snowed, so the two boys leaped on this opportunity like a singing frog on a lily pad, straight and solid and shining with the sun shining on the snow that soon would be crusted on their clothes. They had bundled up in twos: socks over socks, pants over long johns, coats over jackets, mittens over gloves, caps over caps; if possible, they would’ve worn two pairs of buckle boots. Lee and Jay; names like two little birds; first Lee, nine, who slid his sled to Jay’s; then Jay and Lee eventually quick through the streets—stopping only four times for snowplowed king-of-the-hill jousts—then trudge across a field and towards a pond, walk around it and there’s the hill. —But before the hill: Jay, nine and a half, who h...

[This is the opening to a story about a young boy who wanders into a stand of trees and finds a small but central mystery.] It was all quarter-acre lots with smallish houses—five models to choose from: two split-levels, two ranches, one Colonial—leaving plenty of lawn, border hedges, trees and shrubs, vegetable patches and flower beds replacing the peach orchard that once stood—then in 1952 bulldozed into a moonscape, with only a dozen or so big oaks and maples allowed to remain here and there (the future owners arriving just in time to tell the woodman to spare that tree); but by 1962 it had filled with flora as people from across the Delaware moved in and surrendered to the urge to stake their claims with not merely chain-link fences and and property-line markers but gushing verdant exuberance, seemingly managed and manicured—but waiting for a chance to evade the mowers and hedge trimmers and pruning shears and limb saws, and rise in Edenic triumph once more, always growing to return...