In my childhood home was a small oil painting by Gust Masson—a wedding present to my parents from their theatre colleagues—of dark clouds over the River Scheldt; also a Jules Bovée pastel of a man with a lantern walking into a wintery scene with pollarded willows. Four fifths of these pictures were grey sky. In my early teens I hiked through the Flemish countryside and absorbed with all my senses the nuances of how it manifested. For every season I knew the flowers, the small creatures and the ditches; the cows behind the electric fences and the buttercups, the shrines along the way. When I sang, it was to the skies and the flat land. That felt like home. I have since emigrated to two other continents, but in spite of an adventurous adult life have not fused this intimately with a place again.

We walked here in early spring this year: my 93-year-old mother, my sister and her husband, and the cousin who was hosting us. We had separately travelled by boat, plane, train and automobile to be together. We tossed Thomas’ Feels like home challenge around: was home in a landscape? I felt a pang of belonging reading the slogans on the backs and sides of tractor-trailers powering down the highway: so many European languages and none of them unnerved me. Better still, four of us shared a mother tongue. Whether we walked on the dikes that keep the sea from eating the land or in the well-ordered fields and orchards, the feeling of home was in the being together, in the comfortable use of language. My brother-in-law speaks no Flemish yet how bravely he improvised. How brave are we all, when the feeling of home is not a given … which for most of my close family is a lot of the time.