Chainbloging: "a sky full of stars"

I grew up in Denver, Colorado not thinking about how the sky looked. It was just there, blue in the daytime and black at night. People from out of state would always talk about the sky. They would marvel at how bright the sunlight was and how blue the sky. At night they would stare in wonder at the heavens and say something about how the stars looked close enough to touch. It wasn't until my husband and I moved to Florida that I understood what people were talking about.

My husband got a job in Tampa and we made the trip to our new home by car. We were almost at the end of our long drive when we stopped at a restaurant in Jacksonville for a late dinner. As I got out of the car I looked up at the night sky and froze. Something was wrong with it. It wasn't black enough and it wasn't deep enough. I also noticed there weren't enough stars in this strange sky and the stars that were there were farther away than they should have been. Also, they didn't look right, they looked as if they were underwater. Then I understood.

I was looking at stars that were now a mile farther away from me than they had been in Denver. I was also looking at them through an atmosphere that was more dense and humid that skies above Denver. "My" stars looked like flicks of white paint on a board painted jet black. These stars were smaller flicks of white paint on black velvet.

I never did get used to that velvet night sky. When we moved back to Denver a year later I was happy. That first night back in Denver I looked up at a sky full of stars close enough to touch and I knew I was home.

This is part of a chain of posts linked together by word association. The previous link in the chain was here. If you want to write another link here's what to do: Find a word, phrase or theme from this post to inspire your own and go and write it. It's that simple. Try not to write something that's similar to this post. That way the subject of the posts along the chain will vary. E.g. if I write about going to the doctor's, then don't talk about the last time you were ill, instead describe how you used to play Doctors and Nurses with the girl next door. Get the idea? Your post can be in any style you want. Copy this paragraph and tack it onto the end of your post, updating the link to point here, then leave a comment here that points to your new post.