Where Is Home?

By 2016 the question had stopped feeling abstract. We'd lived in enough places — enough countries, enough climates, enough versions of ordinary life — to know that home wasn't a location. But we hadn't yet found what it actually was. It wasn't the house in California we'd left in 2009. It wasn't any of the places in between, however much some of them had felt, briefly, like an answer.

What we knew: we weren't done moving. What we assumed: the next place would be different — not a stop, but a landing. Then life intervened with the particular force it reserves for things that aren't negotiable. We moved to Sarasota to be with Betsy's mother through the end of her life. We were sedentary again, and it felt right. She died peacefully at 93, in 2018 — a good death, a cared-for death. And when it was over, we looked at each other and understood that it was finally time.

We chose Portugal. Seven years on the road had done the work of elimination. Since 2019, we've been home.

We used to joke that home was wherever our bags were under the bed instead of by the door. Buenos Aires qualified for four months. Cuenca for three. Antigua, Guatemala, for two. The joke held up longer than it should have.

What we were actually doing, without quite naming it, was running a continuous audit. Every new place got evaluated — the weather, the cost, the pace, the question of whether we could imagine being old there. Most places passed some tests and failed others.

Granada was beautiful and consuming. Berlin was electric and relentless. The U.S. kept pulling us back and never quite holding us. We got good at leaving. We were less sure what we were leaving toward.

By the time we understood what we were actually looking for, we'd stopped looking for it directly. That's not a paradox — it's just how some answers work. Home wasn't a place that met our criteria. It was a place where we stopped running the criteria.

Portugal was what happened when we stopped running the calculations.