I came across a half-finished blog draft from several years ago, written after an interval of moving between places and calling each one “home” for a few weeks. At the time, it was a stretch of fun travel and an opportunity to spend more time with Chris. In hindsight, the lasting effect of that season of travel was more significant than I expected, and it changed how I think about home.

We spent the first four months of 2023 finding new adventures; about half the time on the road or in new places and half the time back home in Rooks County, Kansas. Our travel map included Lawrence (KS), Fort Collins (CO), Phoenix (AZ) and Bethesda (MD) and allowed us to visit all three of the amazing humans we call our children, plus spend a few weeks working locally for my job.

From January to April, we put 6000 miles on our vehicles, played the license plate game a lot (and never found them all in a single trip), explored cities very different than our rural stomping grounds, discovered walkability scores, and talked for hours as the miles rolled by, getting from here to there and back again. We approached each location with the same question: Would we like to live here? While I knew we were considering where our next chapter might be, I didn’t realize at the time that we were also learning how we wanted to live.

We came to appreciate that living somewhere we could park the truck for a couple weeks and walk (or use public transit) to reach the places we were going brought us a lot of satisfaction. We sorted out what we needed to bring with us to feel at home (a really good kitchen knife is essential, for example), and what we didn’t need (I never did wind up using my yoga blocks but aspirationally brought them every time). And after 30 years of marriage, we even learned a little about ourselves and each other. Extended proximity, without the scaffolding of routine, has a way of revealing things you don’t notice in the margins of ordinary life.

Chris doesn’t love staying (and especially sleeping) in a basement. I really prefer the feeling of a smaller city over the hustle and bustle of a big one. And while we can peaceably share almost any size of place, it is more restful for both of us to have a little elbow room and space to decompress at the edges of the day.

Our road trip days are over (for now) but the lessons from that season are still with us. We bought a house about half the size of the one we lived in in Kansas and downsized our possessions with genuine joy, keeping what matters most to us (both the knife and the yoga blocks made the cut). We chose a place where most days we can walk or bike wherever we need to go—groceries, errands, meals out, haircuts, doctors, dentists—and the cars mostly stay parked. We found a home that felt cozy and grounding, with enough elbow room to breathe, in a small city that had what we need without feeling overwhelming.

That season of travel in 2023 helped us create a version of home shaped by what we learned on the road: less space, used well; fewer things, chosen deliberately; a rhythm that favors proximity, ease, and time together. Home still isn’t about an address as much as it is about how we live inside it, and that understanding continues to guide us, even now, when we’re standing still.