As a child in Fitzgerald, Georgia, way back in the middle of the last century (that sounds archaic), I was struck with the wildness of the land. I felt the elemental potency beneath my black patent Mary Janes (polished with Vaseline). Quicksand could take the dog. A tornado might rip every trailer and shack into the sky. Collapsing limestone layers could swallow a house whole—only a crooked chimney visible in the sudden chasm. Or the river floods, jumps its banks, sending a shack drifting, forlorn family riding the roof. The air rising above asphalt roads shimmied in the heat, oncoming cars quivering like mirages. Sheet lightning flashes like shook foil. There was, too, the acidic sweetness of roadside plums in the country, the dense scent of cotton fields after rain, lurid sunsets, water moccasins the size of my leg, icy springs bubbling out of the ground, and ten thousand other ways that I felt the innate energy of the place slapping me into a visceral identification with our plot of earth. Clear as the outlines of a saucer magnolia: the southern instinct for place.

Then came the home-bred writers, spoon-feeding me: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—I’ll never get beyond The Yearling—and her beloved homestead, a cracker farmhouse deep in the orange groves of north Florida. At twelve, propped in bed, turning the pages of Gone with the Wind, what I was enchanted by was not the plot, the Civil War, or Scarlett and Rhett. I was hit by Tara, the iconic house. I absorbed the message: Home means more than anything. Later, I found Flannery O’Connor nailing her place to the ground, Thomas Wolfe in a boardinghouse in Asheville, elegiac and lyrical, Edgar Allan Poe, all dire and sad, Carson McCullers, who had the guts to begin a book “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” Zora Neale Hurston, digging back into witchcraft, spells, folklore, with her philosophy of being too busy sharpening her oyster knife to bother with what others thought she should be bothered with. Frank Yerby! The librarian disapproved of my voracious reading of his steamy novels that featured keys being passed to forbidden lovers and thrilling affairs. I read and reread Eudora Welty, that going-to-ground writer, living at home with her mother, her homespun magic and gigantic talent.

Then my soul mate: James Agee. His sense of beauty in every crevice, his tragic love of place, and his gift for taking you there. And over us all, looming at five feet four inches, cross yourself as you say his name: William Faulkner, epic father, lonesome homebody.

I already had the place inside, but when the writers came to me in high school and college, they named the nameless and thereby pinned me to their pages. Home. A place in the sun. Home, briar-caught, Christ-haunted, peopled by the living and the dead. Homebody me. The house: one’s body living in another form. Homegrown. The idea burrowed into the canaliculi of my brain. Home place. To this day I can touch every inch of the house where I grew up—where the doodlebugs burrowed under the hydrangeas, my mother’s yellow mixing bowls, unraveling ropes that raised the windows, climbing peavine on the front porch, the little iron door on the outside of the chimney where ashes fell out, my twin white spool beds with pink linen bedspreads scalloped along the edge, boxes of bullets and hunting rifles stored in the back of my closet. Such memories rise into a different consciousness of that time and might seem suspect viewed with a long lens, especially from those with set ideas of the South. No one is more aware of the ramifications of racial dynamics in the past than thoughtful southerners, of all races.To those who question any positive memory, I can only quote Federico García Lorca: “Beneath all the statistics / there is a drop of duck’s blood.”

Wherever I live, the house feels alive. Even in graduate school and newly married, a sudden startled homemaker, I began buying bargain antiques at auction, envisioning a romantic atelier in the university-provided apartment. I was imprinted with my mother’s quest for the ideal house, with not a remote chance of living in one.

Then, grown and married, a saltbox in Massachusetts, a 1743 village house in New York, the low, L-shaped Palo Alto house with loquat and orange trees pressing close to so much glass. East coast, west coast—first for schools, then for work, for life. Moving went against my instinct for the taproot place one passes on to the next generation, but we moved. I resisted. Accommodated. And moved. For my husband’s work. Through peregrine years of raising my daughter, living in a marriage—all exciting, tumultuous years—I wrote poetry. And I painted and wallpapered and stripped and refinished. I cooked. This came from the love of it and living on graduate student scholarships, but also I still was answering some call from the Deep South sense of place that I inherited naturally.

Once settled, I loved New York, Boston, San Francisco, every place I lived, but what widened the aperture was where I traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. Unhooked from the South, in each country I now had fantasies that I could upend my life and live there forever. I wrote six books of poetry and a field guide, The Discovery of Poetry.

One July (fast-forwarding), after my marriage to my brilliant college boyfriend ended, I rented a house in Tuscany with friends. Rural life in those ancient hills simply knocked me in the head. After several more summers in sun-drenched villages, I forked over all my savings and bought a long-abandoned country villa. The life I forged caused a personal tectonic shift. The place had formed the inhabitants as surely as in creation tales where humans were patted into shape from mud. I was riveted by Italian time—long sine waves of artists, farms, history, piazzas, vineyards, cuisine—but, really, what I loved was the lively intersection of place with people. A vivid homecoming.

In Italy, learning a new language, soaking in piazza life, restoring a house, meeting people from all over the world, my poetry refused to break into lines; stanzas reverted to the actual meaning of the word: stanza = room. I bought a bigger notebook. My concept of time expanded and cubed. My fatalism subdued. I moved toward memoir as I felt myself begin to be changed by the place. The happiness that suffuses my Tuscan days drove my pen. I wanted, with my net, to catch elusive and fragile happiness in images. I was at home in Tuscany. Home free. As I thought more about the why of that, I embarked on a travel narrative originally called At Home in the World. When I found out another book already had that title, I changed it to A Year in the World. I explored what it would be like to live in other countries, some new to me and others that had attracted me on previous visits: France, England, Wales, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Turkey. Traveling became not just travel but a choice of living a new way. I learned to see a place from the inside out rather than as a visitor passing through. Renting houses, apartments, even a boat, turned into a way of asking: What is home here? Who are these people and how has here caused them to be who they are? Home truths. I found out I could be at ease in the Arab quarter of Lisbon, in a former schoolhouse in the Cotswolds, in a whitewashed cottage in Crete with bougainvillea blossoms blowing down the hall from the open door.

Although my taproot led me to think of home as a fixed place, home became a portable emotion. Possibly this is genetic? Built into the DNA like a bird’s instinct for migration. Or not. Carson McCullers writes:

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

The poet Pablo Neruda claimed there are only eleven subjects to write about. He doesn’t say what they are, but one of them, and the most difficult, must be happiness. Another must be home. Both subjects are hard to sustain; often they’re entwined quests. Happiness: How to write a book that has no tense plot, an unforeseeable resolution, and not even an I survived motif? Well, I thought as I began writing about Italy, let’s just go a little against the grain. I quit worrying about conflict/resolution and character development requirements. I’ll try, I told myself, simply to re-create this place in tactile, evocative words. The writing felt spontaneous. When you’re falling in love, everything is lit from within. When you’re falling in love, you’re greedy and generous, lavishing your insatiable desires over all you encounter.

At the end of writing Every Day in Tuscany, my third memoir, I decided to leave my home in San Francisco and return to my origins—the South. (My family always claims that I took the first thing smoking on the runway out of there, forgetting that there was no runway then. I’d had the instinct that, as a woman, I would forever be stalled by someone sidling up saying, “Buy the little lady a drink?” Or by well-meaning good ol’ boys wanting an ornament by their side at the club.) My husband, Ed, was up for the move. He went to graduate school in Virginia and felt a strong connection to the gentle southern seasons. And the better proximity to Italy.

Back in North Carolina, we didn’t locate the right place right away. First, we lived in a columned house with a pretty view of a golf course. With some irony we called it Magnolia Hall. Out walking with a friend one morning, she showed me her friends’ farm on the Eno River. She said she thought they were selling. Jokingly I said, “I’ll buy it.” A few months later she called. “They’re moving to California.” Ed and I walked around the grounds and fell under a spell. We bought the historic farm with extensive gardens in Hillsborough. I thought, now that I was getting older, I would have a world there, one I wouldn’t have to leave if fate had hard surprises in store for me. (Home to roost.) The agent kept calling it our “forever home,” making me feel like a rescue dog. Then, all at once, this farmhouse suddenly takes my love, my time, my hard work. I realized that I would passionately belong to it (instead of it belonging to me).

How to understand this frequent shedding of skin? Rehome, what a weird word. What is home? I have lived in eight states and Italy and countless temporary perches. On insomniac nights I walk through all sixteen houses. (Homework?) Each one, truly home. Each one a change marker. (Home place.) Where much of what happens in life happens. The one I walked out of. (Home wrecker.) The crux and crucible. Where you are manifest. (Homespun.) Home became a shapeshifter.

On these spring nights before the arrival of mosquitoes, I take my glass of wine out in the backyard and look up at the stars. Remember what Earth shows us: You are a traveler. Stare up for a while and you know. On our blue ball, we’re rounding the bend toward, then away from light. Our progress has no names, no stations along the way, only seasonal markers on Earth—the blending of spring into summer, into autumn, winter. We’re falling into longer days, shorter nights; we reverse. Astounding—we are unconscious of the vast trip we are on every instant of our lives.

Outside on a May night, take a glimpse into space long enough to see the shift of a constellation. Catch the flare of a star that fell eons ago, its arc of light just reaching your eyes. Your back against the damp grass, you’re wheeling into the unknown. Paradoxically, traveler, you feel at home.