When I called today and told a friend in Chicago that I was planning to move again at the end of the month, this time to a rental apartment nearer the lakefront and closer to downtown, she said, “Boy, I don’t even remember what it’s like to move. I’ve only lived three different places in my life.”

I started thinking about how my 43-year-old life has been filled with one move after another. Before I was even six years old, my father moved my family from my hometown of Akron, Ohio, to San Jose, Costa Rica, where he and my mom trained for a year to become missionaries in the jungles of Ecuador (another two-plus years).

Upon returning to the United States, we lived out of a fleabag hotel in Miami, Fla. as my father contemplated where to go next. We ended up camping out inside my grandmother’s house in Akron for a year before moving to a small farm/resort town in north central Ohio (Loudonville, pop. 1,300) that none of us had ever heard of before.

I lived there until I left for college, first attending Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and then transferring late in my freshman year to Ohio State University, where I lived in various dorms and later (in my junior year) moved to off-campus housing.

The rest of the list goes as such: Cincinnati (as a summer copy editor/features reporter intern at the Cincinnati Enquirer); Cleveland (as a summer sports intern for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper); Sayre, Pa. (my first permanent job as a bureau chief for the Elmira Star-Gazette newspaper); Lexington, Ky. (as a stringer for the Lexington Herald-Leader); Detroit, Mich. (as a sports copy editor tryout for the Detroit News); Chicago (where I first worked as a feature reporter and columnist for the Naperville Sun and later moved into trade journalism, living in six different apartments, including one in Naperville, in the space of nine years); Brooklyn, N.Y. (as associate editor for Graphic Arts Monthly, a trade magazine covering the commercial printing industry), Manhattan (where I continued in the same job for three-plus years and then worked independently out of my home); Arab, Ala. (where I lived six months in a trailer out in the country) and then back to Chicago.

Currently I’m in Zavalla, Texas, visiting once again a friend I stayed with for two solid months last fall. It feels like home right now. Last summer, I stayed for three months in the home of married-couple friends in Bloomington, Ill. Once again, it felt like home.

I guess the moral of this story is I don’t feel like anywhere is home anymore. It’s gotten me over this whole idea of “home.” It just doesn’t exist in my world, especially since I took the big road trip out West and slept in my car for days and days on end, interspersing it with necessary motel stays. Home, at that time, was literally wherever I put my head on my pillow at night. And I stayed on city streets for a lot of it!

More and more, I see heaven as my real home and down here as just “whatever-it-is-for-the-moment.” I just want to get to the point where I can really, really say, “I’m over it! Who cares!”