I come from a loving, story-sharing family. There were a lot of funny people in my family, from my dad, with his Jack Benny delivery, to my sister who tends towards the outrageous. And my mother, and my cousins, and my uncles. I have some stories too.

When I was a little girl, I rode my bicycle every chance I got. I pretended that I was driving along highways in far-away lands. My bike gave me the first sense of a larger world, certainly one in my imagination, but also of a real one out there, where I might go some day. And it gave me a longing for travel. In school, I loved study hall in our tiny, cozy library at Madonna High School, with the book-lined walls and the long tables, the silence and the peace. In this library, I read e.e. cummings' rare work of prose, “The Enormous Room.” It's an autobiographical novel about his period as an ambulance driver in France during WWI, and the subsequent time spent in a French prison. It wasn't exactly a book about travel, but what captured me were all the passages in French that I couldn't understand. I vowed to learn French. And remembering my bicycle rides, I vowed to go live someplace foreign.

In college, I hung out with the foreign students. I still remember my cousin Irene teasing me about the guys I dated. “See America first!” Irene told me. But I also know there was envy because of my Persian boyfriend, who looked like Omar Sharif and wore a long suede coat with a fur collar and drove a small blue convertible. He was, in short, exotic and cool.

And I did study French. And met a Frenchman, at—of all places—New Mexico State University. And I sort-of learned French. And I went to Paris after I graduated to see if we wanted to get married. We got married the following year.

But there's more to my life than a romantic ending, living in Paris with a Frenchman. Michel died in an automobile accident, and I was left a young widow with a fifteen-month-old baby.

I might say that querencia is a place of safety. I might say that querencia is a place where people love you. But what happens when those people are gone? Memoryland is also Querencia. But not all memories are safe. We cannot always be protected.

One day, in the months after Michel died, I was still with his family in Grenoble, and my father-in-law, Pépé, felt beset and beleaguered by the rest of the family for something that he had done badly. I don't know or don't remember what it was about, but it gave him a chance to threaten to throw himself off the balcony. Everyone in the family knew that Michel could have calmed Pépé. I thought, “Michel, why have you left me to face this?” He was gone, instead of protecting me from his family's dramas, different from my own family's dramas.

I would have to learn to protect myself. But I also learned fears and hypervigilance because I now also had to protect my son. Safety was elusive. Eventually, I returned home to New Mexico, to the comfort of my mother, my sisters, my family of cousins, aunts, uncles, sky, clouds, mountains. To create a new life. I moved between New Mexico and other places, looking for home.

I have always been lured by the call of the “there.” And I have been lured by the call of the “here.” Torn between the two. Stay or go? Go or stay? I have gone far away. I have moved among continents. I have returned. I left the south of New Mexico, came north as far as Vermont. The “there” does become “here” if you stay long enough. But you still don't forget other ways and other lands. And feel a sense of longing for what's not here.

One summer, I attended an intercultural communication workshop. At the end, in the closing ceremony where people stood up to share their learning and insights, one young African American woman stood up and said, “I have spent all my life feeling I lived in the margins. I am happy to see so many people who live in the margins, too.” Because that is what happens when you travel. You take on pieces of other worlds, of other cultures. You lose some of your own rootedness. You see other ways of doing things, other ways of thinking. You are not as secure anymore. You live between two worlds. You are trying to feel secure being a bridge, but you are shaky in either world, not entirely belonging yet, or not entirely belonging anymore. You feel like an imposter.

Sharing stories with family and friends at a meal, around a table, is querencia as well. Food is querencia.

Food was an important element in our family's traditions. There were Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas dinners at Aunt Elsie's, to which my mother always carried her vaunted sopaipillas. And there were her special tacos when we invited people over; it was our standard meal. Last Christmas, I went all out and made red chile from the pods, empanadas of mincemeat, and dozens of biscochos (in northern New Mexico they are bizochitos, but in the south, they are just plain old biscochos). Growing up, we did it all: the green chile-roasting, the red chile-making, the biscochos, and the pumpkin empanadas. Making tamales was not part of our tradition, though eating them was.

I am imagining a meal for next winter's holidays that will include my Mother's tacos, enchiladas with my red chile, posole with my red chile, the store-bought tamales, frijoles, calabacitas , and pumpkin empanadas and capirotada (called sopa in northern New Mexico) for dessert. There will be more food than people to share it.

When we share stories, we braid them together into larger stories. We are a multiplicity of voices, of languages, of stories, each one authentic, each one with its own power. There are many stories that can all be true. Here are more stories.

After my husband died, I returned home with my son, and then went to graduate school in Vermont, then back to live and work in France for a few more years. And finally, back home to New Mexico. I still took my son back to France every summer, because he had that other querencia, and other antepasados. Little kids learn languages quickly, forgetting them and remembering them again. One year, when Eric was about five years old, my mother said to him, “Eric, you are going to see your Mémé in France. Do you still remember your French?” In his childish wisdom, Eric answered, “I still remember my French; I just forgot all the words.”

We forget the words, but we remember the feelings. We forget the words, but we remember the land. We forget the words, but we remember the food, and the smells, and the laughter around the table.

One year, at Christmas, Eric came home from the university, with three Russian friends. I remember cooking a lot and washing a lot of dishes because they liked to eat, and loved New Mexican food. They wrapped their tamales in flour tortillas. I almost told them that wasn't the way to do it, but then I thought, “Hey, that must be the Russian way to eat tamales. What do I know?” But it's okay that we are different, it's okay that we speak different languages, that we forget words. And it's okay if we have a funny way of eating tamales.

I really like the idea that though querencia implies “rootedness,” it doesn't imply being static. Instead, we send out tendrils of connection. I like to think that we emerge and grow like trees, with roots that hold us secure, but with branches that reach in all directions.

I went looking for my place to be. And I came back. But that doesn't mean that I am not still looking.