I'm sure I'm not the first to point out that home is an interesting concept. From the time I was twelve until just recently, I never really felt I had a "home." Skipping from Greece to Washington State to Chicago to Buenos Aires and, most recently, San Francisco, it was difficult to build a strong enough foundation to feel grounded anywhere. I departed from one home in childhood and returned to find I had grown up. I left another as a sad teenager and went back as a confident adult.

The reality is I change and so do the things I value and cities change along with the people in them. I found that as much as I chased after a place that would feel like home again, there was no returning to childhood summers in Greece, with the toasty sun on my back and the false promise that fall would return with the same schoolmates and friends I would share my youth (and/or life) with. So, appreciating the past as opposed to living in it, I've learned to make each new place I go to feel like home. I collect small meaningful trinkets from everywhere I live and nest as much as I can in my new place, wherever it may be. I make reliable friends who become my family. (Luckily in San Francisco I have cousins who make the city home!)

Still, though, the nostalgia I feel for my country is unlike the nostalgia I'll ever feel for Washington or Illinois or Argentina. And nothing stirs it in me more than familiar smells. Jasmine flowers at nighttime, salty ocean winds, oregano, even goats.

Most recently I was at Tilden Park in Berkeley, where the smell of eucalyptus trees was swimming in the air. It reminded me of all the eucalyptus in Greece and the way the leaves grind so easily into the dirt and how especially fragrant they are after it rains. It made me want to go back for a visit quite badly.