A forever home.

The concept of home -- specifically, the concept of a forever home -- is intriguing me this week.

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We talk about how home is where the heart is. Going home for the holidays is idealized. When we discuss adopting a pet, we talk about giving them a forever home.

But home is also where you find it, as your adopted pet can tell you. And home may not be where the heart is if the heart was badly hurt there, through abuse or neglect.

Lots of people have become nomads. It's estimated that 40 million Americans move every year at least once. That's 40 percent of us. Some may move for work and some for retirement or other reasons. And certainly, many of them may have an idealized vision of their forever home in their heads -- maybe they lived there once and want to move back, or maybe they believe, or at least would like to think, they're moving there now.

And sometimes you think you've found your forever home, but things change and you find yourself moving on.

Home is sort of a sub-subplot in Rivers Run. Collum Barth is a gnome -- an Earth Elemental -- whose family has lived in (or near) Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, for centuries. He has put down roots there, as an Earth Elemental would. He is the family home, and by extension the region surrounding it.

But he's the only one left. His brother left for college and when he returned, he settled nearby -- but not in the old family home. Collum's parents, too, have moved away (we'll explore their new home in the next book, Treacherous Ground). But Collum identifies with the old place -- the one that straddles our world and the Otherworld.

By contrast, Raney Meadows spent her youth on the run. She's an undine -- a Water Elemental -- and at home in fast-flowing water. Her mother constantly moved them from place to place, sometimes at a moment's notice.  Now Raney is an actress with a beach house in Malibu, but she doesn't talk about it as if it's her dream home. It's a place to hang her hat -- and submerge herself in the soaking tub and the swimming pool. But a forever home? She may not have one.

I'm not sure I have one, either. Unlike Raney, I didn't move around a whole lot as a kid. But unlike Collum, I haven't lived in one place all my life, either. When I was in radio, I moved around a lot -- from Indiana to West Virginia to Tidewater Virginia to the DC area. Then we lived in Denver for a few months. For many years, I thought Colorado would be my forever home; now I'm not so sure. My current candidate is Santa Fe, but it occurred to me last week that I might not stay there forever, either.

And tonight, I learned that whole rural villages are still for sale in Spain. I'd read a few years ago about one village up for sale, and figured that was the end of it -- but no, apparently that one was the vanguard. There are lots more now. And they're cheap. I don't know how difficult it would be to retire there -- the EU has rules about letting Americans move in, after all. But...hmm.

As for Raney and Collum, I'm not sure where their relationship is going. Raney's career is in LA, and I doubt Collum would move there for her. I guess we'll all have to wait and see.

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Camp NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and I am rested and ready. I punched up the outline this evening and am ready to hit the ground running. I'll let you know how it goes.

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These moments of homey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Defining home.

The concept of home has been on my mind a fair amount lately -- ever since I closed a chapter in my own life by selling my interest in the house in which I grew up. I tell the story in the memoir I'm working on, so you'll get to read it eventually. But now I find myself in an odd position: for the first time in my life, I have the opportunity to define my own home.

For many people, I think, this is a no-brainer. Home is where they grew up -- the place where their parents still live, maybe, and where they return for family holidays. The house I grew up in doesn't have that kind of resonance for me. I moved out nearly forty years ago; for the first twenty of those years, I worked in radio, and scheduling prevented me from forming the habit of returning home for the holidays. Then, too, my father has been dead for more than thirty years; my mother, for ten. If you define home as people more than place, my childhood home has been gone for many, many years.

By my age, a lot of people have bought a house (or two) and settled in for several decades -- and then that structure becomes home. But owing to those years I spent in radio, moving from city to city and from job to job, I was rarely able to settle in one place for long enough to make that kind of planning possible. So for the most part, I've parked my stuff in a succession of rental properties. And while they all met the need at the time, and while I called them home in a colloquial sense ("I got home at..." or "I'll be home tonight" or something like that), they were never places where I put down roots for very long.

Again, if home is people more than place, then of course I'm home when I'm with my daughters. But it's different now that they're adults. We all live in the same apartment for now, but they have their own interests and friends, their own way of doing things -- as they should. It's natural and normal and I'm not sad about it. But home feels different than it did when they were little.

And now that I'm getting close to retirement age, I have an opportunity to define a place that might very well be home for the rest of my life. I'm without touchstones for this task. There's no need to base my decision on the usual factors: proximity to the job or to good schools. I almost need to rewrite my list of must-have and would-be-nice features.

And I have the whole, wide world to choose from, in a way that's never been available to me before. Sure, many places are impractical or impossible for one reason or another -- too hot, too cold, too expensive -- but that still leaves a lot of options.

It's all a little daunting.

I told a friend not long ago that my decision will ultimately come down to way the place feels when I get out of the car and put my feet on the ground. When the earth there reaches up and grabs me and draws those roots out of my soul, that's when I'll know I've come home.

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These moments of homey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.