Reasonably Nice Couple In Search of Forever Home

What happens when you're willing to go a really, really long way to find home

Outside the mercado, where you can spy the mountains (summertime).

I’m on week three of covid. Or, more accurately, I apparently decided that a detour to a secondary viral infection would be more interesting than a straight shot back to health.

This second wallop of illness has offered plenty of time for reflection and staring out the windows, since most normal life activities are still out of reach.

And I’ve been thinking about home.

Before we moved abroad, I heard a common sentiment from other folks who had been living abroad for a while, and it amounts to this:

“Once you’ve lived in another country, you won’t ever feel fully at home again.”

Home = a sense of roots and belonging, I suppose.

It was something I pondered then and I am pondering still, observing where I find feelings of home and where they are missing.

I don’t remember feeling fully at home anywhere I’ve lived. I spent my childhood in Virginia, my teens in Idaho, my twenties in Tennessee, my thirties in North Carolina, and then in my forties moved to Washington State, briefly back to Tennessee, and finally to Portugal (there was also a short stint in Hawaii before North Carolina).

I came the closest to a sense of belonging in North Carolina, but it was temporary and, once it was gone, I felt completely out of place.

I wonder if most people have the extensive conversations that J and I have had before deciding to move to another country. We hear a range of stories from YouTubing American immigrants, and sometimes it sounds as simple as “we were restless and didn’t want to spend the rest of our retirement here.” For others it’s much more complicated.

For us it was much more complicated.

While “home” is an intangible sense of belonging, it can also be a very tangible, practice set of needs and/or desires.

For J and I, it ran the gamut from practicalities like wanting to live in a safer place to pursuing a sense of home that could not be pinned down and described in words.

As much as we agree that we want adventure, to learn and see new things, and to experience different cultures, at the end of the day home is everything to both of us. We are homebodies. Our sense of belonging in a place and to a community is something that hovers at the edges of our experience…without ever fully arriving.

Juxtaposition.

This right here is the closest we’ve come, I think. It didn’t take long to start to feel at home in this city. But we aren’t convinced it’s home-home.

It’s maybe a little like looking for a partner. You hope for a mix of characteristics and compatibilities, along with enough spark, that you might fit for long enough to adopt a pet and buy furniture together.

In Washington, we thought long and hard about what home would mean in practical terms. Then we started visiting places. Virtually, through the pandemic, and then after narrowing it down to a specific country we visited in person. We explored eight or ten different Portuguese towns and cities, different regions and climates and sizes. We got a sense of what was a better fit and what wasn’t the right fit at all. We also noticed that we immediately felt more at home in some towns than others - and that sense had nothing to do with the practicalities.

When the time came, we chose a location we’d never visited…strictly for practical reasons and as a soft landing in a new country. We’re dating-not-serious. But it’s surprised us how “home” it has felt; it’s a lovely, healthy relationship and we’re all having fun.

We think there’s a good chance that Portugal is The One, in a larger sense. We don’t know for sure; we’re keeping our eyes open. (This first year away has confirmed that it’s not the U.S., so at least we’re clear on that.)

We don’t have the desire or the energy to become digital nomads or move six more times; we’re getting older and would like to settle down in the near future. We’d like to buy a house and not resell it within a couple of years. We’d like to put down roots in a community for the long term, to get to know people and be part of their lives through seasons.

But we’re not quite there yet. For now, we’re enjoying exploring new areas, getting to know ourselves more, and getting a better sense of what home feels like to us. We’re finding flexible intersections between fun and serious, expectations and reality, dreaming and practicality.

We’ll know when we’re home, and I’ll be sure to share it.

(Back to tea, pillows, and Netflix.)