In the country where I live, there is no word for home. You can express the idea at a slant, but you cannot say home. For a long time this disconcerted me, and I kept running up against the lack as if it were a rock in my path, worse than a pothole, worse than nothing. But with time I have habituated myself and can step around it, using variants such as 'the hearth' or 'the house where I live' when I mean to say home. More often, chez moi is the phrase I substitute to indicate not only physical location and the sense of family, but also my comportment, even my point of view. However, if I wish to speak of 'going home to Canada,' I can say 'my country' or 'the place of my birth,' but I can’t say I am going chez moi when I am not, for as long as I reside in France—most likely the rest of my life—this is where I will be chez moi, making my home in a country and a language not my own. I am both home and not home, one of those trick syllogisms I must solve by homemaking, at an age when I should have finished with all that bother.

Sometimes I wake in the early morning before it is light, the still, dark hours of contemplation: How have I come to be here? I wonder. But there is nothing mysterious. The reason is mundane: It is the will not of God but of the Scottish-born man to whom I have been married since 1970. We agreed that when he retired we would settle here, after the first time we came hiking in these mountains nearly a decade ago and he knew he was at home here in this landscape, chez soi dans le Cévennes. When it happens, this carnal knowledge of landscape, it is very like falling in love without knowing why: the plunge into desire and longing made all the more intense by being so utterly irrational, inexplicable. The feel of the air, the lay of the land, the color and shape of the horizon, who knows? There are places on the planet we belong and they are not necessarily where we are born. If we are lucky—if fate wills it, if the gods are in a good mood—we find them, for whatever length of time is necessary for us to know that yes, we belong to the earth and it to us. Even if we cannot articulate this physical sensation, even if language fails us, we know then what home is, in our very bones.

I say jokingly that I am a wtgw—a whither-thou-goest wife, an almost extinct species, but one with which I have become familiar in the 13 years my husband and I have lived abroad. I have met many other women who have done the same as I have done: One weighs the choices, and then one follows. And so it follows that I shall make this house home and attempt to put down roots, find out how to grow in and be nourished by this rocky foreign soil.