“You do skies well,” she tells me and I smile a little longer than I should, keeping the compliment for myself before passing it on to where I grew up. She’s looking at a photograph of a North Georgia sunset. “Yeah,” I say, “we really do.”

“Where are you from?” The answer narrows depending on who asks. The South. Near Atlanta. Chattanooga. But where I’m really from is Fort Oglethorpe, a two-highway crossroads situated between a factory town turned tourist site and a Civil War battlefield. That’s where I grew up, where I saw what those skies do.

Early one morning, I was eight, riding with my cousin in the top-bunk of a mobile-home. We were sleeping, calm children dreaming their way to Disneyworld. Somewhere between home and the Florida state-line, I wake and stare out the window. We’re driving South, driving toward the Moon, and I can see his face. The Man in the Moon is winking, moving his mouth as a trick of the clouds, telling me things and I’m trying to listen. I didn’t wake my cousin.

Another drive on a Sunday afternoon, riding small in the backseat of a relative’s Lincoln, the leather under me too warm and the clouds above me become buildings, a skyline in the sky. Reddish-gold and white-gold skyscrapers appear, a metropolis of Heaven. Years of Sunday school took on meaning and I conceived of an afterlife more than just singing and strumming a harp.

I walked to elementary school. It was a short trip, across my backyard, over a fence, over a stone bridge, across the playground and down a sidewalk. East into the sunrise, I squinted the whole way. One morning the sun conspired with the clouds and appeared as a giant red ball just over the horizon. A comic book sun.

One evening, I was ten and I found myself in a yard not far from my own. The neighbors had a brush pile, all thick limbs and almost-logs, perfect for climbing. I’d scaled the pile alone and hadn’t determined how to get back down when something caught my eye. I looked up and focused on a thing I didn’t recognize. Two discs linked together, silver and shiny, moving across the sky like a plane and making discernible hum. It left no trail, kept in a straight line. I was alone and there was nobody to ask what it was. I never did.

Kids would gather in my backyard, the biggest on the circle. There I hosted pick-up softball games with boys and girls, only a handful of them I knew by name. They were just there to play, bringing their own gloves. When we didn’t have enough to field a team, the bases would fill with Ghost-Men. A Ghost-Man on Third made it Home on a single. As we played, the air filled with the scent of Mom cooking dinner until Dad called me to the table. Players took their gloves and walked home, Ghost-Men following, scores forgotten.

Those sunsets, when Southern skies swirl and streak like paint. The backdrop of a childhood spent in a backyard, in the backyards of others, suffering mosquitos and smelling honeysuckle threaded into the links of fences intermittently placed and easy to cross. Dad would look out from the dining room window and grumble at neighbor kids, boldly traveling through our yard to another, knowing I was the reason for some other father’s grumbling in some other part of the neighborhood. These yards were a shared space, all under the same sky.

Cicadas kept a constant chorus, occasionally interrupted by a barn owl. Sprinklers, lawn mowers, basketballs in driveways, voices of neighbors several houses away, their laughter the only certainty. The sounds of summer’s humidity, settling like an old house creaking. All the while, that sky went darker. Porch lights go on. Time to go home.

I’m older now by decades. That old neighborhood is so different now. Fewer children, older adults, more heartache. And me, I’m miles and miles and miles away.

I miss it often. Sitting in the grass in my old backyard, clover at my feet. Reading a book with my back against a tree, sunlight fading, words growing faint.

Cicadas, treefrogs, mosquitos, honeysuckle. Red into orange into yellow.

We walk in Manhattan at sunset, sit on stoops, peer over roofs of brownstones, and count the water towers. When the buildings turn gold, I take her by the hand and say, “Look at this light, look at what your city does so well.”