When my older sister and I were quite small — this was before our younger sister was born — our mother used to tell us stories sometimes before bed. I remember one summer, on some hot summer nights, lying in bed in my tiny bedroom, I suppose we were in there because I was younger. My mother sat on the edge of the bed and told us a long, involved story of the Blue City. I wish now I could remember the story, although maybe it’s best I don’t; it may not have been nearly as mysterious and evocative as I remember it to be. My bedroom faced east, and the last light of the sun reflected off the old white Hodgman house across the street and filled the room with gold-tinged light. In those days, whippoorwills still called in the summer evenings; but whippoorwills have long been extirpated as breeding birds in that part of Massachusetts, and the hay fields and apple orchards behind where we lived have been covered by sprawl in the form of low-density starter mansions, and indeed that modest house we lived in was recently torn down and replaced by a three-thousand square foot house. It’s still there in memory: the fading light, the hope that I’d hear a whippoorwill, the Blue City.