For the past two plus years, I’ve been living with my Mexican husband in Los Cabos, Mexico. Neither of us are from here: he is from a Mexican city on the mainland, I am from New Jersey (loud & proud), and we first met, fell in love and moved in together in New York City, which is about as far from “Cabo” as it gets, both literally and metaphorically.

When we moved into our house here one of the first things I demanded, after we had installed a few fans and light fixtures and bought a mattress, was putting up a set of bookshelves. Of all the other things that seem important when you are moving to another country, like making sure you have enough underwear and that the cat has treats on the plane, bookshelves were, to me, paramount. Partly that’s because I shift my books from place to place, and every time I move or travel, I have at least a few that are especially important and careworn on hand for comfort; but it was mostly because I can’t think of anything that says home more than a brimming shelf full of books and knick-knacks. (Presently these same shelves include piles of books, copies of magazines I have written for since we moved here, a Day of the Dead candle I bought at the Wal-Mart, a painting of New York’s Theater District, and a much-glued-together antique ceramic cat figurine that my dad gave me when I moved out to Brooklyn and acquired the first of many cats.)

Now, we have listed our house here on the market and are planning to move back to the United States after the holidays– which is to say, imminently. We have been talking about going back for well over a year, but until we took a recent trip to San Diego to scout out potential living situations there, the reality of moving again hadn’t really sunk in entirely. It’s quite strange. The US is “my” country, but being in San Diego felt alienating and strange; I’ve never lived, or wanted to live, on the West Coast, and if I had never made this zany move to Mexico, I probably never would have left New York City. (It is, after all, the greatest city in the world.)

So in a roundabout way, instead of going “home” to New Jersey or New York– the only places I have ever described that way consistently– I might wind up in yet another strange city, trying to hang on to the sunlight and beach weekends that have characterized our life here in Cabo. I keep asking myself the practical questions: Can our marriage withstand another strange city? Can I withstand all that West Coast cheerfulness? What about New York? What do I want? But the most important question is: Will it ever feel like home?

John Berger (among others, but this might be my sentimental favorite) writes beautifully on the subject of borders, displacement and home in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. The first time I read it, the personal passages on displacement and frontiers didn’t click for me: I lived at home, and then I moved to a different home, which was my apartment in Brooklyn. When I traveled it was just that, travel. Borders had never affected me except in an ordinary and commonplace way: something to explore, an interesting intellectual subject, or a physical thing to cross. I feel differently now of course. That’s a topic for another day.

But now, walking the quiet floors of this house during the day, going about my day– an hour or two of writing, housework, picking up after the cats, fixing a lunch out of bananas and grapes and corn tortillas– I know that it has become as familiar to me as home. It is a home. Perhaps a person can have more than one?

Consequently, it will be hard to leave it, even with the comforting arc of logic that precipitates the move. It will be hard to leave the familiar stairs, the balcony where I sit and smoke, brushing ash from the ledge and watching the hummingbirds feed; the sink where I stand and wash the dishes, the knife-nicked counter where I chop garlic almost every single day, sipping wine or beer and thinking about the dinner ahead of me.

And of course the bookshelves, which have now become too small for their charges– the headboard of my bed now serving as the largest bookshelf in the house, sadly hidden upstairs behind a closed door– what kind of bookshelves will I have next? How long will it take me to fill them? In relation to placing that first creased book in its new spot, wiping down the cover with a damp cloth, how long will it take me to think of the next place we go as my home?