“If I lived here . . . I have a feeling this place would take me.”

So says Frances Mayes in ‘A year in the world: Journeys of a passionate traveller’. And we all know what she’s talking about. I mean, haven’t you ever been on holiday, thinking to yourself while driving through a quaint little town, “I can live here.”

“Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different,” Frances writes. Doesn’t it make you ponder, girlfriend, about all the different versions of yourself you’ve been in the different homes you’ve lived in? Or about the different version you might become in another place?

In ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ Frances writes: “Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it.” Later Frances writes that to sell a house is to “walk away from a cluster of memories and to buy is to choose where the future will take place”.

In an article, ‘The psychology of home: Why where you live means so much’, Julie Beck writes that the script is a familiar one: “You move out of your parents’ house, maybe go to college, get a place of your own, get a bigger house when you have kids, then a smaller one when the kids move out.”

“But in spite of everything – in spite of the mobility, the individualism, and the economy – on some level we do recognize the importance of place. The first thing we ask someone when we meet them, after their name, is where they are from, or the much more interestingly-phrased ‘where’s home for you?’

Julie says we ask because we realise that the answer tells us something important about the person. “No one is ever free from their social or physical environment. And whether or not we are always aware of it, a home is a home because it blurs the line between the self and the surroundings, and challenges the line we try to draw between who we are and where we are.”

In ‘Understanding the Psychology of Your Home’, architect Sam Jacob writes that a client called him late one Sunday evening in quite a state. The client had been looking at a tap catalogue and the choice had sent the person into a tail spin of introspection. The desperate plea was, “Sam! What kind of tap am I?”

“Sure, it’s ridiculous,” Sam writes. “But it’s also understandable. Homes are highly complex things: social, symbolic, economic, psychological and legal entities – among much else. The idea of home is a highly wrought cultural entity and even the most modest of decoration projects can cause a personality crisis.”

Do we realize how much living in a specific house becomes part of who we are – not just a reflection of who we are? Take memories as an example. Remember your childhood home? Or your first flat? Julie writes that when you visit a place where you used to live, there are so many clues that suddenly bring to life the person you were when you lived there. Nevertheless, she says that looking back; many of her homes feel more like places borrowed than places possessed: “In the scope of a lifetime, I was only a tourist.”

Do you feel as if you’ve put down taproots in the house you’re staying in? Or as if you’re only camping out? In ‘Under Magnolia: A southern memoir’, Frances Mayes writes that she has always admired lives that flourish in place.

“I like generations following one another in the same house, where lamplight falls through the windows in squares of light on the snow, and somebody’s height chart still marks the kitchen doorway.”

Yet Frances kept moving. She says that at a few times in her life she wasn’t aware that she’s just stepped onto a large X, not knowing it’s time to leap. Change might not have been on her mind. Why change? Why take a chance?

Maybe, girlfriend, it’s as Frances says: The only thing more surprising than the chance she’s taking
. . . is where it’s taking her. And she’s not necessarily talking about geography; more about something that happens between you and a place; “the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else”.