Our expulsion from New Orleans by Katrina was painfully disorienting but when Rita threatened to uproot my family from our temporary shelter in Houston, just as we were on the verge of moving to our own apartment in town, I really began to question the meaning of "home." I might, on a good day, subscribe to the notion that home is with family, or wherever one enjoys the support of community. Home, as the cliché goes, "is where the heart is"—a phrase that suggests something more metaphysical than the plot of land on which one sets up shop. After Rita, however, I became convinced of the profound, if not equal, significance of place to one's sense of well-being.

Returning to my brother's house following a three-day evacuation, my son Dylan seemed to feel the pleasure and reassurance most of us experience in coming home or regaining a space that is consistent, familiar and safe. Loping through the house in happy anticipation, Dylan made a beeline for the bedroom he now referred to as his room (despite the fact that he shared it with me, my husband, and our family cat), and fell onto his bed, with apparent relief. After nearly a month away from his real home in New Orleans, Dylan was obviously adjusting to life in the makeshift refuge of my brother's place. He had come to expect its noises, colors, and smells and, for a toddler, as for most of us, recognition and contentment are closely linked.

Hence, when we began the next day to repack our bags for the move, including all of the toys he had amassed during his sojourn in Texas, Dylan became visibly anxious, running tearfully from room to room in search of his things. When I tried to explain to him that we would be moving to a new home, a "home of our very own," he seemed even more unsettled, insisting, in a voice that was part determination, part desperation, "I want my room!"

By the time both of our cars were stuffed with old and new household items, those objects slated to recreate for us a sense of belonging (and for which we had made multiple trips to Target and IKEA), Dylan had become completely unglued. Clinging to my skirt and pleading to be held, while screaming an undifferentiated "NO!" at anyone else who ventured to console him, he adamantly refused to get in my car. Finally, Chris had to strap him forcibly into his car seat beside our anxious cat whom I had had to hurry past my brother's two overly excitable Jack Russell Terriers. As Dylan screamed, the cat clamored around the back seat in search of a reassuring corner in which to hide. At last she settled into Dylan's beanbag chair and Dylan downshifted from high-pitched screams to occasional whimpers. I sighed with relief as I eased my car into traffic and headed north, Chris following close behind. Just when I thought we were out of the woods, however, the cat, obviously overwrought with tension, urinated on the chair and Dylan began to wail anew; "my chair is crying!" he yelped, in between his plaintive sobs. "Baby, please don't cry," I begged him, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. "We're going to your new home in the city!" "That not my city," Dylan snapped, knowingly, as if exposing my lie.

After we had reached our destination—a tiny one bedroom apartment over a ramshackle garage in the heart of Houston—after we had cleaned and unpacked in an initial attempt to make the place livable, and after he had calmed down long enough to survey his environment, Dylan announced, with surprising resolution, "I can't like this house. This house too broken." And I had to wonder if, in that moment, he was echoing my own acute feeling of impermanence in the wake of so many changes. Perhaps what had been shattered in me, in us, was only an illusion of stability, but I could not, anymore than Dylan, like this new and broken sense of home.