Four years ago, on a plane from New York to Tucson, I scribbled out an homage of sorts - a love-letter to the place I'd spent the first 22 years of my life. In my grieving this past month, I dug through my computer to find that piece, hoping it would ease the pain.

It was obvious from the first few lines how much the whole world has changed - changed in the horrific irony of a New York minute. And suddenly there is new meaning in the words I'd written so innocently.

From 1997: I am sitting in La Guardia airport, waiting for my flight after surprising my closest childhood friend as she turned 40. After all these years away, she is still my best friend, and so it made perfect sense for me to fly to New York, just to show up at her door. Deb turned 40; I came home. I have traveled all over the continent for a living. The trip I make most often, though, heads to or from New York, my birthplace. And despite the fact that I have built my life in a place I love; that my daughter was born and raised in Tucson; that my business and my friends and even my transplanted mother now reside in the desert sun - after 20 years away, going to New York is still "going home."

1997: I could piece together my life story just by my trips home. When my baby was three and life was feeling calm, we brought her to Deb's woods in the Catskills. Cool rain poured down around us as we huddled in the thicket deep in the woods, keeping dry just like Bambi did in Lizzie's book. We searched for berries, watching as our little girl shoved handfuls into her mouth, onto her shirt, staining her tiny hands. The desert has no berries. It has no thicket. It is only at home that I can show her these things. Years later, when my marriage died, I came home again, back to Deb's woods, this time to heal. I sat motionless for a whole week, the sound of wild turkeys in the grasses and the soft wet green of home acting like a salve to the wounds that threatened to disable me. I spent the week building strength enough to get back on the plane and head to the desert that held my pain.

And the ocean, so much ocean that folks don't even see it, just like they don't see the green. I spent my adolescence writing angst-ridden poetry along the shore of the Long Island Sound. And by the time we were in our 20's, we would pass our summer nights sipping iced tea with fresh mint on the patio of a City Island hide-away, listening to the hustle and bustle of returning Saturday sailboats.

For one, it is sticky. I'll confess to romanticizing that part - I do forget that it's sticky. When I think of schlepping on the subways to get to Fashion Institute, I think lovingly of every minute of rushing and dragging in the cold and wet, in the hot and wet. But it WAS romantic. After school, with the Christmas lights guiding me, I would sneak uptown before taking the train home. I'd ice skate in Rockefeller Center. I'd go to Bendel's and play dress-up. I can forgive myself for forgetting that sometimes it really is too sticky to bear.

1997: When Lizzie was eight and old enough to begin to see New York as her mama does, she and I spent a week with my brother in his 22nd floor upper-east-side apartment. We stared downtown through the floor to ceiling window of his bathroom, and the Manhattan lights convinced Lizzie that the opening of Saturday Night Live was shot through her uncle's shower. We breathed and tasted the city. We visited the Metropolitan Museum, searching in vain for the long-removed fountain where Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler's friend Claudia bathed with her brother in the book Lizzie had just finished. She gasped and cheered at Cats, her first Broadway play, and we strolled along the boutiquey strip of Madison Avenue, where the clothes and the chocolates are all divine. We danced at the top of the Empire State Building. And Lizzie learned firsthand the difference between summer in New York and summer in her desert home, as two sticky August days in Central Park put us back on the plane ahead of schedule. As the cabbie took us to La Guardia, she told him we had to escape to the dry 105 degrees we understood.

1997: I caught the first flight out when they called to say Daddy was gone. I sobbed the whole flight home. They lost my luggage, and I stopped crying long enough to threaten what I'd do if I had to go to my father's funeral wearing the clothes I'd flown home in. I still remember my aunt and uncle meeting me at La Guardia. It was raining - it rained the whole week. I was 25 and married only a month, and I flew home to do what no child, at any age, is ever prepared to do. On the return flight, I leaned into the window so hard I felt I was melting into that New York skyline. And I knew that as long as I was inside that skyline, Daddy was somehow still alive, still with me. The woman next to me talked from the moment I sat down, and I wanted to scream at her to just be quiet! Let me be alone out here for my last few moments with the skyline and my father. Please just let us be!

1997: Lizzie wants to live here. Of all things. I left and made a life 3,000 miles away in the warmth of the sun, and as soon as she can, she wants to be back where I left off. She's barely begun 6th grade and yet talks confidently of attending NYU. She is pure energy, my little girl, and she and my city will vie to keep up with one another. They will both make me proud. She will love New York. But the desert was her first home, and whatever life brings her, Tucson will be the place she flies back to, smiling as she remembers the smell of creosote when it rains, the javelinas and the monsoon lightning and the saguaros reaching for a sky filled with stars. She will smile from someplace inside her that she is still too young to know exists. Because regardless of where you live or where life takes you, that's what it feels like when you're going home.