I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts and after a brief intro, the host asked, “if someone were to ask you ‘where is home,’ what would you say?”
Her question prompted me to pause the story, and immediately start thinking deeply about the idea of home, and how it morphs and changes over time. How it is different for each person, and how for some, home changes in drastic geographic ways, and for others it evolves in subtle ways. I thought about all the places I have called home over the years, and how they have played a part in who I am today. I believe that anywhere you’ve ever lived can become a small part of you. And a little piece of that place will always live on in you.
Home in and of itself is a permeable concept, like language. It lives and mutates and grows and evolves over time. It also means one thing to someone, and something entirely different to someone else. I think you can live a place for many years, but it never really feels like home. Conversely, you can live somewhere a short time and it feels like home right away. Have you ever traveled somewhere and thought, hmmm, maybe I could live here? But the reality of settling down in a place is far, far different than the idealized, neatly wrapped bundle envisioned over a second glass of rose in the sunny haze of vacation.
Living in another country for a decent length of time is an experience I’ve had twice now. Both times, my sense of home became a lot more nuanced. In Germany, more than 10 years ago now, I marveled at, got frustrated with, reveled in, and eventually became accustomed to a very different culture. At a certain point, home was no longer the place of my nationality, the place I had always known. I had put down roots elsewhere, and seen a perspective from outside the US. Too much had changed in me and been informed by a this new culture. Yet, in my adopted country and culture, I was still something of an outsider. Home was no longer there, but wasn’t yet here. I was in a kind of limbo.
I’m not just talking about a house with your bed and your cat. I mean that broader, more elusive place. The one that feels familiar, where you know you are safe and cared for, and where you have grown as a person. The one that carries your memories on its wind, where you feel like you belong. That is the crux of it. Because wrapped up in the question of home is, essentially, where to do you feel like you belong?
Over time of course, a place does become home. You live enough, build memories, carry on with the day to day, and in due coarse someone asks for directions, and you respond in another language. Eventually, it all adds up to…a life, in the place where you have now made it. It took time, but Heidelberg became home. A home I have fond memories of, and that was utterly informed by my late twenties and early thirties.
When we left Heidelberg and returned to San Francisco, back in 2011, I had a kind of reverse culture shock. It’s not uncommon, although I don’t think it is talked about much. That limbo state came back. San Francisco no longer felt like home, it was too familiar and it hadn’t changed enough. Yet I had changed tremendously. At the time, it felt like I had grown, but it hadn’t. I missed Germany and my quaint apartment. Even though it wasn’t mine any more. I missed my local spots, my friends from all over the world, and walking up the the castle lawn to lay on a blanket and read under the huge old trees. I felt like I only had a tiny taste of this bigger world, and I craved more. I wasn’t ready to come back to the easy familiarity of everything I already knew so well. I wanted newness.
Time passed, and during that stage I had a massive period of change—excitement, confusion, resentment, upheaval, disruption, release, discovering a new version of myself, creating a business, shame, pain, love, growth, atonement, healing, forgiveness, and finally reconciliation—that I won’t go into any deeper here. But San Francisco did become home once again. We stayed ten years.
Then, it shifted again. First the pandemic hit and slowed all our plans down. But it also gave me an even keener sense of how important home is in making a happy life. Once more, major life moments seemed to collide in a short stretch of time. In 2007 it was leave job, get married, move overseas all in three months. In 2021 it was get pregnant, move overseas, have baby in new country, with a distant move career to new country all in six months. It was a lot. But it was exciting, too. I just kept telling everyone we were embracing the adventure of it all.
Which brings us to present day, living in Switzerland—in this gorgeous, stubbornly pleasant, painfully expensive bubble of a place—still embracing that adventure. That limbo state has returned yet again, but this time, better prepared, I am ok with it. I know that with time, home will feel more like home. Even if we’re not quite there yet. We have made a beautiful, utterly cozy abode—a balcony bursting with plants, exposed beams, art all over the walls, bread-baking Sundays, and charming rooftop views dancing to the horizon. Our time here has always been and will always be defined by our daughter.
For Edie, who is now two, I often wonder what is her sense of home. She is American, but she is not growing up in the United States. At some point she will identify more as Swiss than American. Or will she? Will she feel kinship with both? I have no idea because her upbringing is so different from my own. She will learn another language (or two) alongside her family’s native tongue, American English. And she will have international friends with their own cultural customs and languages. But she is growing up with more of a European view of the world than an American one, so far. She is learning Swiss customs. She takes the tram everywhere, she spends summers down by the lake, and she is used to things being very clean, very efficient and very safe. For now, her home is unquestionably Switzerland, but more specifically it is mama and dada and Liesel and Miro. It’s not Napa, or California, or even the United States. Even though those are all places that still come to mind when I think of home. Though living overseas is exciting and exotic (some would even say elitist), it’s also quite isolating and lonely. We are very far from family, and that never gets easier. So how much can a home really be a home when those you love are so far away? Is home then, less about a place and more about the people who make it?
Until I figure it out, I like to think of home as an amalgamation of all those places (and the people in them) 8that have embroidered themselves in the lining of my heart. Each place I have been fortunate to call home, is a color of thread in the fabric of my story. Full of laughter and sorrow, delight and pain, love and loss, they make a quilt all the more rich because it is woven with so many colors.
Please forgive that belabored metaphor. Throughout this post I’ve included photos of all the different places I’ve called home. Each one beautiful in its own way, each one having a role in creating the person I am today, and each one special to me.
In combing my archive for these photos, I found it curious that I seem to have the least number of images in the place I have lived the longest. Well, I suppose Napa is technically the place I have lived longest, if you count years one through eighteen. But as an adult with autonomy, San Francisco takes the crown. I think it might be that San Francisco was always home, so I never felt the need to capture it in the moment. Perhaps that will change when I next visit. I hope my post has prompted you to reflect a little about all the places you have lived, and what they all mean to you.