Such a pedestrian enquiry, one that any moderately verbal toddler is schooled to answer briskly with a street address, a house number, the name of a city or a town. Some of us will live in only a few places in our lives; others, like me, are the kinds of people who mess up your address book, constantly sending out change of address notices. When I make a tally of the places which I could, at various times, have given in reply to the question where do you live, I arrive at nineteen. This, rather alarmingly, averages out to one move about every three years. There was a Cairo address that I learned to write in Arabic. A street number that was hard to find amid the graffiti tags in lower Manhattan. A house without a number in rural Virginia, a graceful old apartment in Cleveland, a horsehair-mortared terrace in Hampstead … numerous dwellings on four continents. But very few have truly felt like home. The idea of ‘home’ is bigger than the floor plan of any given four walls or the mass of any roof line.
