My family moved to San Diego from northwest Missouri when I was a young girl, and I thought my dad had brought me home to paradise — the constant sun, the endless ocean, oranges that grew in our own backyard, and oh, those sexy Mexican American boys with their slim hips and dark eyes, and Mexico itself just across the border.
But paradise or no, there was a time when I abdicated to Los Angeles and a time, somehow, surprisingly, when I wound up in Oklahoma, neither of which felt like home. I also settled in San Francisco briefly, lived in Barcelona for a couple of years, and located myself in Paris for a few frigid months during the winter of my forty-eighth year.