They covered the landscape with their cities.

It was a society of continual expansion. The streets were lined with huge, sweeping, spiralling buildings of all shapes and sizes. Some were clusters of small, independent structures; each room of the house standing alone and separate. Others were towering monoliths, clawing their way towards the heavens. Nothing was complete; everything was continually growing and expanding, climbing higher and higher, wider and broader. Scaffold was as common as ordinary wall, and the figures of men crawled across the exteriors of the buildings like ants on a discarded apple. The society was dying.

Their growth had progressed from a creative pursuit to a cancer. They could not stop building. Their sprawling estates twisted and grew, and grew further. They built, and they grew, and they spread. They covered the landscape with their cities.

Until, one day, a young man appeared among them. He spoke of the vastness of the skies and the depths of the oceans. He told them of the myriad infinities to be found within a single leaf on a tree in a forest. He spoke to them, and they listened, and they stopped building. They yearned for the quiet solitude of a meadow in fall, for the busy hum of a pond in spring, insects and animals and trees all abuzz with life. They looked at the clouds and they looked at the oceans and they looked at their cities.

The flames were visible for miles.

Just don't call me Davy

When I was little, my mom used to sing to me. She would sing the theme from Gilligan's Island. She would also sing the theme to the old Disney movies about Davey Crocket, except she would change the lyrics.
Instead of "Davey, Davey Crocket, king of the wild frontier," she would sing "Davy, Davy Bessom, king of Newport News." Newport News is, of course, the city where I was born and raised.
Instead of "Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee...," my mom would sing, "Born in a hospital in Newport News..." I'm sure she would also sing altered versions of the rest of the lyrics to the song, but I don't remember them.
I'm sure I enjoyed this singing, to some extent; but this act also gave rise to one of my first complete sentences,

"Don't sing, Mommy."