NOT LONG AFTER my fortieth birthday I open, for the first time in years, a scrapbook Mom made for me. There are photos of humpbacks, taken from the deck of a whale-watching boat we boarded in downtown Boston, and a copy of a survey that she subsequently helped me write and distribute to everyone on our street, in which I asked our neighbors to “please check the box which is your favorite vote”: “I would like to save whales” or “I would not like to save whales.” (She also helped me send the unanimous responses somewhere, to the White House, I think; I remember a reply, a form letter, held by a magnet on the fridge.) There are report cards, and photos taken from atop the World Trade Center in New York sharing a page with ones of us in Pittsfield, which she’s captioned “City and Country!”

Midway through the scrapbook is a map of an imaginary city. I was in seventh grade, maybe, when I made it, and the city it depicts is a country mouse’s wide-eyed dream: there are monorail stations, various churches, each marked by a blue cross, and an airplane that waits where the runways of the “Intergalactal Airport” intersect. In the western quarter of the city is something I went to some trouble to conceal, with white correction fluid that’s now as finely cracked as a cloud in an oil painting.

Beyond the churches, the highly developed transportation infrastructure, and my mistake, lie the banks of the city’s river. In fact, the river appears to be the dominant feature of the metropolis, and I’m sorry that on this quiet afternoon, as I run my index finger slowly back and forth over the blue ink almost three decades after I drew it, I can’t remember as little as its name, or which way it flows.