Homer, Alaska is a great place for someone born in the south to consider the meaning of clouds because here they are a combination of ocean-formed ones and those high altostratus we find further north. On the drive from Anchorage I noticed a lot of familiarity in the sky, but also new forms that I hadn’t seen before — like the clouds shrouding the peaks across the bay, as if poured into the mountain crevices. Further north there are a lot of high clouds, too, like the ones we have seen in places like Washington and Oregon. They are typical of coastal mountainous areas, with partial blankets on the sides of mountains, and low-hovering ones in the valleys.

But there is nothing remotely tropical here, not like the first clouds I can remember. The cumulonimbus at Grand Isle in Louisiana, from my perspective just over the waves, were seemingly billowing grey cotton balls aligned over the horizon, appearing as if they were hand-placed in the sky and collapsed under their own weight to flatten their bottoms just above the water line. I recall those days every time we visit. We arrive by plane since we live so far away from there now, and as we land in Houston or New Orleans those giant white puff-balls our plane dodges during the approach are always the first familiar things — and seeing them almost feels like carelessness.

For the first thirty years of my life I only knew those cumulus or nimbus clouds, since the cirrus brought by cold fronts were so fleeting and rare. Everyone there knows them well. During the summer they are the daily harbingers of afternoon rain, or maybe the precursor to a hurricane — and even those storm clouds were just different versions of same familiar ones, only dingier and more stretched out with their extra humidity.

It has been seventeen years since I left Louisiana, and yet all the low stratus and altostratus of the north still feel strange. During the winter they are much less formless and more encompassing than the clouds I’m used to, enveloping the sky often for weeks on end with a low-hung blanket of grey. And the summers often aren’t much different, just fewer of them higher in the sky.

The further north we have gone, the fewer friendly cumulus we see. Here, clouds even seem to lose their autonomy altogether, without the same boundaries as their southern counterparts. They appear to have been pulled apart, flowing from one to another, a network of moisture without any real division.

Why do those white billowing giants in the southern sky give me such a sense of comfort when I now consciously dislike my time there, and don’t really want to go back? Maybe I will always be connected with that place regardless of how I contemplate upon it. Or is this only one of the last temporal strands of a broken web, and can I ever really break free?

By now I’ve grown to expect the northland’s monochromatic winter cast or the white smear across its blue summer sky, so they aren’t unfamiliar. But I don’t know them like the tropical clouds that feel like childhood. Seeing the southern sky is still like a muscle memory. But, I realize the insincere safety is only in the memory of my youth, and I have been careful not to apply a value to their latent familiarity because I’m unsure what it means. Instead, nowadays I’m satisfied with studying the skies here, contemplating the appearance, and attempting to interpret the weather.