Homesick for Paris?

Yesterday, my ten-year-old daughter Ella came home from school and said, “I’m homesick for Paris.” We’ve been back in the States for a few months, long enough that I thought she would be settled by now.

For me, our sabbatical year in France sometimes seems like water that’s boiled out of a pot and dispersed in the air. Our life in the spiral-staircased apartment across from the Catacombs has escaped out the door, flown up into the sky, and bonded with a cloud.

But for Ella our year away remains real. “My soul is European.” She left her heart in Paris.

What does it mean to be homesick for a place that’s not your permanent home? Where you weren’t born? Where your family doesn’t live? What does it mean: home?

As a child, I felt homesick for places I hadn’t visited. I longed to live in New York City, even though I’d never set foot there. I saw the city in person for the first time when I moved into my college dorm at Columbia at age eighteen, but I’d seen enough of this iconic place in books and movies and on TV that I felt like the city and I were old friends. I was home.

I felt so at home that leaving New York City several years ago for Virginia felt like leaving my homeland. New York is like its own country, so different from anywhere else in the U.S.

To my surprise, I settled easily in Virginia. Charlottesville isn’t a big city, but it is full of smart people making art. It feels like home. And so did Paris. And so does Charlottesville again. Now that I’ve been uprooted once, I’ve grown more mobile and flexible. Ask me to switch cities or countries and I’ll say: “I need a little time. How about next week?”

Compared to the people Ella went to school with in Paris, I’ve barely moved at all.  Their definition of “home” was a place they’d stayed for at least two years. “The third year is always the best,” they’d say. “Too bad you can’t stay in Paris that long.”

I hope it won’t take three years to recover from homesickness. In the meantime, I’ll whip up Ella some recipes from my French cookbook. Lentils with Toulouse sausage. Ratatouille. Navarin d’agneau. Then a plate of Southern fried chicken, to show we don’t have to choose only one place to love.

Sometimes what we’re most nostalgic for is food. And one definition of “home” is simply this: The place with home cooking.