The sprawling white farmhouse looms in my headlights. I always seem to arrive home from my travels at night. Stepping out of the car, I’m hit by the fecund smell of the Eno River, which cuts through our meadow, wet grass (needs mowing), the greeny scent rising from a thousand trees, and the sound of screeching tree frogs. If it’s early summer, any breeze wafts the divine sweetness of magnolia and tea olive. In winter, winking string lights along the porch cast light onto the bumpy stone path that ruins the wheels of my roll-on. In deep summer, bright sparks of fireflies, in autumn the crunch of fallen walnuts, and a clutch of purple asters around the back door. Kiss the ground. Pull the door to you or the key won’t turn. Then it does. Anyone home?

Home: where and why this house? Is home fixed forever or a moveable concept? How do four walls, utilitarian and convenient, or soulful and evocative, connect with your metabolism and turn into that charged feeling of I’m home? Or is home a quest never to be fulfilled? Down the road not taken—was there a blue door for you to open? Some writer said, “My home is my subjects.” What a floating idea of home. Mine feels more visceral. Most alluring, the places where you feel an immediate, illogical bonding. You wish you lived there but you never will. Capri, San Miguel, Provence—you imagine yourself extant in another version that may for years run parallel to the road taken. What’s the truth—that hotel that caused me to refer to it as home after three days, or the house where I grew up? The first eighteen years: the spool bed, the mirror above the pink-skirted dressing table, ceiling fan pulling in a humid breeze over the buffer of hydrangeas around the house. Others? A boxy apartment at Stanford, where through thin walls I heard my neighbor cry out that Kennedy was shot. The New England saltbox in Bedford, prim black and white, where snow came up to the windowsills and lilacs surrounded three sides of the house. On Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, the L-shaped house, the inside of the L all glass. Orange, lemon, loquat trees. My Selectric typewriter on a picnic table by the pool, poems blowing into the water. My San Francisco Victorian flat where I became single after years of marriage? That first night, surrounded by packing boxes, the foghorns sounded like strange, mournful calls from far under the ocean.

I’ve always loved suitcases. The luggage rack stays up in my bedroom. That damp stone house above Florence, where bats flew around the fireplace. The gullet in Turkey where ten of us slept on cushions under stars, while the rigging clinked time with the swells. Home for a month, a whitewashed cottage in Crete, with bougainvillea blossoms wafting down the hallway. The rented house in Sicily can pull me back. I’m in the kitchen deciding what to cook and where I’ll find a private spot to write about how we live there. Long after the key is returned, I’ll revisit what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being.” Is where you are who you are? Maybe home is as small as a suitcase.

I’m not looking for answers, but for more and more questions about what home means, how it hooks the past and pushes into the future. Often, it’s mysterious. When my daughter was young, we lived in Somers, New York. In 1768, a man named Joseph Sunderland hid his account books—elaborately penned in black ink—along with seven thick sheepskin condoms in the rafters. Over two hundred years they waited for me—why me?—to reach behind a beam and bring them back. A millwright and maker of coffins. Enamored of a maid who lived in the attic room? We skated at night on Dean’s Pond. Maybe he did, too. The old places we love will bring up the question that haunted medieval poetry: Ubi sunt…Where are…Short for ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt, where are those who went before us. Who left a coin between the floorboards, a date scratched on the chimney, the growth chart on the door? At Chatwood, my home in North Carolina, the name Buck was painted inside the barn door, and when I entered, I always sensed a black horse. These homes are vast and dazzling to the imagination.

This memoir is a floor plan of a lifetime of house and home obsession.

Maybe each chapter is a room in the big house.