Where Is Home?
After seven years of elsewhere, the question stopped being rhetorical.
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 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 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 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 the one we stayed in. 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.
Portugal was what happened.