I was mesmerized by the steam that poured from the heated pool house into the cool night air, hovering along the ground, giving the scene a graveyard feel. I ran ahead and pushed open the door to the pool house and the heat smacked me in the face, reminding me of the annual feeling of stepping off the plane into the heat of my mother’s island.

What my siblings and I didn’t know was that the next day, under the guise of a two-day business meeting, my father had the nerves from his left hand moved to his newly lifeless right hand so he could hold the chalk and continue to teach his classes in architectural graphics. After he returned (explaining the bandaged hand as an accident) we visited the Lincoln Memorial and the White House and I had that anxious yet happy feeling one has on Christmas Eve. My brothers and sister were being nice to me (I suspect that as they were older they had a better idea of what was really going on) and I had my parents’ attention and affection. I could have lived at that Tiki hotel.

Eventually we moved on campus as Dad’s increasing immobility demanded a short commute. A few months after his death a good friend of his, a rabbi, was mugged and murdered two blocks from our apartment. Though my mother hated to move, particularly at a time when the care of children left at home and her full-time job didn’t allow her the luxury of grief, we moved back to the New Jersey town where I had spent the first five years of my life. It was not the same without Dad.

When I hit my twenties and moved out, “home” became wherever my mother was: Manhattan, Morrisville, Vermont. Whenever I went off to visit her I would tell my co-workers I was “going home” for the weekend, even though I had never lived in Vermont. Eventually I followed her and my siblings north. Now, eight years after her death my husband and I are looking to buy our first home. When the real estate agent talks of a “starter home” I cringe. No.

I don’t want a starter home. I want a place to stay for a long, long time. I think that is why I took so strongly to my Puerto Rican roots and feel so comforted by the silhouette of a palm tree, the song of tree frogs, and the constancy of my mother’s family. For me the island represents a history my own childhood lacked, and a family center to visit now that my mother is gone. I yearn for fertile soil in which to sink my roots. To plant gardens, paint walls, and hang family portraits. To call somewhere “home.”