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In Spanish and Italian, there is one word, "casa" (with a slight difference in pronunciation), that means both "house" and "home." There is no distinction between where one lives and where one's place is, where one belongs. Well, there is "paese" in Italian, which usually is preceded by a possessive pronoun, as, I assume, is "pais" in Spanish, both of which mean "town", also to which one belongs. What I'm getting at is that these languages, as do probably many other languages and their native speakers, must have an innate feeling of a place of origin, but more than that, a sense of place, and one's role, purpose, in that place. Something like a sense of responsibility to a land, a people, a family, a home. There is no creating a home, no making a house a home. It already exists before one is born. This concept, sadly, is lacking in American society.

Ask any adult American who lives in a city of over, say, 60,000 people, how many times he or she has moved in his or her lifetime. I can't even count the number of times I have moved. From house to apartment, to different neighborhoods, cities, suburbs, states, with different partners, with one child, two children, with a husband, and without one. Take a minute, or ten, or however long it takes you, to consider the transience in your own life. Do you feel you belong? How well do you know the place in which you live? Is it a house or a home? Was it always your home, or are you trying to create a home? Are these things important to you, and if so, and your house is not a home, how many others, I wonder, are attempting to create, or searching for a home, like we are?

For most of my adult life thus far, my home had been a large town, by Alaskan standards. It is a home to many people. It can be an extraordinarily, magnificently beautiful and sometimes magical place, but it never felt like home to me. With a population of around 30,000 people and no roadway out of town, one quickly becomes familiar with the city and its residents, a comforting quality, and something that has pulled me back there twice after moving away, but it is still not my home. It's no wonder that, during the chilly, dismal Alaskan autumn, my heart lifted when my husband considered attending graduate school in the Southwest U.S. Before moving to Alaska, I had lived in Arizona and loved it. I loved rising each morning to the sun, and the monsoon thunderstorms amazed, entertained, and mesmerized me (which is why I thought, so mistakenly, I would welcome

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