Ada’s house had a problem: it couldn’t stay put.
The first time, the family went to sleep in front of a bakery and woke up by the sea. The windows were covered in salt, and a crab had crawled into the entryway.
The second night, the house wandered to a neighborhood of high-rise apartment blocks. The third, it appeared in the middle of an olive grove. One Thursday, it settled on a hill that the pizza delivery guy couldn’t reach.
“That’s not a normal house,” Ada would say.
She had trouble explaining to her classmates where she lived. Sometimes she had to take a different route to school. Other days, her grandmother couldn’t find the door.
The family tried everything. They tied the house to a lamppost, but the lamppost traveled with them. They stuck its legs in the ground, but the house pulled them out like shoes. They begged it to stop.
“I’m just looking for my place,” the house creaked.
“Our place was the bakery street!” Ada protested.
But when they returned, the bakery had closed, and their friends now lived on other streets. Their old place wasn’t exactly the same either.
One night, the house stopped in front of a building where many families lived. There was a mother with two daughters, a grandfather with his grandson, two fathers with a baby, and a woman who lived alone with three enormous plants.
The neighbors weren’t surprised to see a house on legs.
“Everyone here has come from somewhere,” they said.
They shared dinner in the courtyard. Ada played with children who spoke different languages. The grandmother planted basil with the plant woman. Ada’s mother helped fix a blind.
The next day, the house didn’t move.
“Have you found it?” Ada asked.
The house creaked contentedly.
Three months passed. Ada already knew which doorbell to ring to ask for salt and who kept a copy of the key. But one morning the house raised its legs again.
“No!” Ada exclaimed. “This is our place.”
The neighbors came out to say goodbye. They gave them cuttings, recipes, drawings, and phone numbers. Before the house started walking, they painted a small blue door on the facade.
“That way it will know how to find its way back,” they said.
Ada understood that the house wasn’t looking for just one place. It was collecting them.
From then on, each new neighborhood left a mark: a tile, a plant, a song, a photograph. And in each place where they had lived, there was always someone who could say:
“Yes, that family is also a little bit from here.”
