The Best of Both Worlds: Finding Home in Two Places

After my niece was tragically killed in 2011, I started going home to Western New York more frequently to be with my family. It started with three weeks at a time and renting summer cottages, then evolved by 2021 into staying for several months as my mother’s dementia got worse. I became an expert at packing up the dogs and finding a house sitter.

I felt the pull to Santa Monica when I was 16 years old, and it finally became my home in 1993. I created a life there that I loved, but Buffalo was where I grew up, where my family remained and where so many of my high school friends still lived. Returning had always felt remarkably easy, but what initially felt like going home for extended visits gradually became something else entirely.

At some point, I stopped visiting and started living in both places, yet always with the thought in the back of my mind that eventually I should pick one. Then one day I realized perhaps I was asking myself the wrong question.

Home, we are often taught, is supposed to be singular. We have a home, a hometown and a primary residence. We are supposed to know where we belong and plant ourselves there. Living between two places can almost sound as though you haven’t quite figured things out yet, as if eventually you need to pick a side and settle down.

The older I get, the less interested I am in rules that don’t actually make sense for my life.

Western New York and Southern California could hardly be more different. California gives me the ocean, palm trees, sunshine and the particular rhythm of a place where winter barely announces itself. Many of my friends are perpetually young, using skateboards and bikes as transportation. I don’t even own a car. Most are not in traditional family units; many have no children or are single, much like me. We live in apartments and bungalows, mostly rented.

Western New York gives me enormous green trees, thunderstorms, changing seasons, dramatic skies and weather that can apparently experience several personality changes before lunch. Almost everyone I grew up with eventually settled down, raised a family and bought a home.

There is also a warmth here that is difficult to explain without sounding sentimental. People talk to one another, whether standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at a movie theater. Smiling at strangers is simply a given, and everyone, and I mean everyone, loves the Buffalo Bills. My family is here, along with friendships that have remained part of my life for decades. There is a familiarity that requires very little effort from me.

Yet Southern California is equally home.

It is where I created another chapter of my life, built my business and have a beach bungalow that reflects who I am now. It’s normal for me to hop on my bike for a “Sunday Funday” with my beach pals. I love my busy, walkable neighborhood with its coffee shops, bars and restaurants, along with my year-round garden. The life I created there includes an eclectic spiritual tribe who get me. Returning to California never feels like returning to someplace I merely live. These are my “peeps,” and it feels like going home to a wonderful, endless summer.

Somewhere along the way, my sister made it possible for Western New York to feel the same way. Calling what I have at her house a guest room would be ridiculous. I have my own bedroom overlooking a golf course, which I painted and filled with my own furniture. My things are there, and the room feels completely like me. I even have a bedspread remarkably similar to the one on my bed in California.

The Taurus girl in me is all about her creature comforts and thrives in both places. I need my surroundings to feel comfortable and beautiful, with familiar things around me. Wherever I am going to spend substantial amounts of my life needs to feel like mine.

Fortunately, my sister has given me the extraordinary gift of allowing her beautiful home to become mine too. I don’t arrive feeling like a houseguest who needs to make herself scarce after a respectable number of days. I walk into my bedroom, put my things away and resume my life. We get along, are both neat and tidy and remain aware of each other’s needs. Living with her is a little like going back in time, and somehow it flows for both of us.

Being in Western New York has become particularly important now because my mother has dementia. There are realities in life that rearrange our priorities without asking permission, and watching someone you love live with dementia is certainly one of them. Spending substantial periods of time here allows me to be near my mother during a chapter of her life that is fading. Although she no longer knows who I am, I still feel better being close to her.

Someday, I know I will wish I could have another completely ordinary day when my mother was still physically part of this world. Knowing that makes me especially grateful that my life allows me to have those days now.

Perhaps that is one of the things age teaches us. When we are younger, we spend so much time thinking about where we are going and what comes next. Eventually, we begin to realize the importance of being where we truly want to be while we still have the freedom and opportunity to make that choice.

I am also incredibly blessed that the work I created allows me to do this because it travels with me. I can speak with clients and teach from almost anywhere, a freedom I never could have imagined during the years when my career required me to show up at the same physical workplace every day. I also have wonderful in-person client bases in both Los Angeles and Buffalo.

For years, I interpreted my inability to choose between California and Western New York as though there were still some decision waiting to be made. Maybe eventually I would figure out which one was really home. Yet I wonder, does one really need to “win”?

Each place gives me something different. Both contain people, experiences and pieces of a life that matter enormously to me. I miss California when I am away long enough, just as I miss Western New York when I haven’t been back for a while.

Neither feeling cancels out the other.

There may come a time when circumstances change and living this way no longer makes sense. LA is an expensive town for an older person, and maybe summers in Belize wouldn’t suck. Life has taught me enough by now to know better than to assume anything remains exactly as it is forever. For this particular chapter, however, I have stopped trying to solve a problem that may never have been a problem in the first place.

While spending years wondering where I was supposed to live, I failed to recognize how fortunate I was to have two places where I genuinely wanted to live.

There is something wonderful about packing a suitcase and feeling sad to leave while simultaneously looking forward to where you’re going. There is something even more wonderful about realizing that neither departure is really about leaving home.

I am simply going from one version of home to another.

Maybe home was never something I needed to choose.

For now, I am simply grateful that whenever I leave home, I get to go home.