We are no longer nomads, "A member of a people who have no fixed residence but move from place to place usually seasonally and within a well-defined territory; an individual who roams about (Webster's online dictionary)." Or are we?

Our daughter is almost two years old. We began our roaming last July before she could walk or yell out, "Dawg." Then, what began as a period of hibernation, a brief unpacking of our things into a house like a cave on a little Maine island, has turned into a summer filled with thunderstorms and days spent on a sandy beach with packs of other children digging up hermit crabs and shivering in the Atlantic.

I work full-time in a restaurant sweating in the steam of the dishwasher—the heat from ovens and refrigerators and ice machines constantly running—so that my husband can work less and spend more time with our daughter. After work, well past the time when the ferry has stopped floating people back to the city, I jump into the water silent and naked and alone. Sometimes Naima has waited up for me and I come home to the new house that we share with three others, the lights on in every room, and her squealing with exhaustion and an overwhelming desire to nurse until the muscles in her cheeks fatigue.

Or, to avoid this, I bike the long way home—though work is only two blocks away—around the entire island, along the ocean facing back shore where I am draped in a salty mist, thrilled by lightning bugs blinking over lawns and ponds, where bullfrogs croak with the buoys in the bay. Then, perhaps I can come home to a quiet house where I'm too exasperated to write, too exhausted to sleep, and lay in bed sandwiched between my sleeping family, thinking of the things I wish I could do if only I had the energy and the time.

But here, my daughter waves to every passing car, says "Hi" to every passing person, then, "Bye. See ya," and everyone waves back. She's scared of riding lawn mowers, has never seen a leaf blower, stares at young men garishly dressed. So different than how I grew up in Berkeley where we worry about kidnappers and overly friendly strangers.

"What if she were to grow up here?" I ask myself. Would she find it weird to skinny dip in the middle of the night, or to have classmates with two mothers and a father living in the same house, or to see men in high heels, or fast-moving cars with fluorescent lights beneath them that light up the road, or freeways in one's backyard as wide as the Hussey Sound? What do I tell her about the path from which she has come when all I know of my own is myth and story and a few facts on a foreign document?

"Naima, you were descended from nomads, who like the wind whistled while they moved through the leaves in the springtime and in the winter remained quiet with the snow. Irregardless of mileage covered, they worked, they questioned, they dreamt of things that they would one day do, and in the meantime, as they trudged through auburn days, they tried to remember the things they wished to teach their children about the world, and how they wished to see while they were spinning in circles in the dark."