the way that we grow up on the border with the skills of negotiating different worlds and all of that

you don't get that anywhere else or I couldn't get it anywhere else so I really appreciated where I came from

at the same time it freed me to know that I could go anywhere that that the border was who I was. It's who I am.

But it's not a limiting space. It's a freeing space.

This is Death, Sex, and Money.

The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.

I'm Anna Seale.

When I talked with writer Norma Elia Kuntu, she was preparing to sell her childhood home in Laredo, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

A lot of her essays and poetry are about that small wood frame house, which was set up on stilts to protect it from annual floodwaters.

But as she moved the last of her family's

belongings out, she told me she wasn't really mourning the building itself. I think now that we're

all gone and there's no one there, it's just the house. When you think of home right now, what does

that make you think of?

Three things.

My childhood, that was home.

Where I am now, I think that's home.

And I think wherever we get together, we create home.

Even if it's virtually on the Zoom, my sisters and I,

we share what's going on with our lives, we share jokes, what's the latest movie or the latest book,

or whatever you want to share. And that creates home. Norma is the oldest of the 11 kids in her family.

She's described herself as having insufferable older sister syndrome, her words.

But now at 74, she's trying to let go of some of that.

...