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I was back in Lista last week, visiting the small, quiet place where my maternal grandmother came from. I stayed in her childhood home, a staunch house made of listing boards which purportedly dates to 1816. I spent my days walking along the coast, riding the old 3-speed bike from the barn out on the thin roads that thread through pastures, swimming in the bracing water, eating long meals in the tiny yard while Norwegian conversations ebbed around me.

My relationship with my Norwegian relatives is haphazard at best, stymied by the fact that my Norwegian remains poor. Lista--or Borhaug, or Vågsvoll, if we want to pin the location precisely--is not my home, of course. I'm not from there. I remember sitting on the front steps of the old house last summer and wondering what it would be like if I were from that small place in the shadow of the Lista lighthouse; it would be different, surely, and I would be different. So, no, it's not where I'm from. But it's as close as I get in Norway, and even as I fall out of step with these Norwegian conversations, I'll occasionally skim from them a story about my grandparents, and inside the house their are photographs of my grandparents, my parents, myself. So if the house is not home, it is not unfamiliar, either. Lista is similar: it is, after all, a place I've been before--last summer, last spring, ten years ago, twenty-four years ago. I know the roads in a loose way, enough not to feel lost. And I have family here who will embrace me, even if I am definitively American and a little at odds; because there is no question about the fact that I am family. And maybe that's part of why Lista feels a little bit magic: I am not from Norway, but I'm tied to this particular part of Norway, to this place. The cords have been frayed by time and salt, but they're there, tenuous but real.

While we were sitting in the tiny yard that's wedged in between the house and the road, eating rice pudding and drinking coffee, one of my mother's cousins told me, first in Norwegian and then in English, that Tante Sine--my grandmother--used to say that it's the same sun, same moon, over Lista and the U.S.A. And I suppose she was right. But as I watched the full moon rounded itself out over Lista, I wasn't sure how much it mattered. I was happy to be where I was.