Ahoj from the snowy and chilly Midwest! It’s been a long time since I posted here. Transitioning from the fall to the winter –amongst other things such as dissertating, searching for a job, teaching, planning out the future– has kept me busy.

But I’ve still had the time to feel homesick.

I suppose it’s the winter.

Winters in the Midwest have always made me homesick. As the snow piles and temperatures drop, midwesterners rely more and more on their cars. You see less and less people out in the streets. Then all you’re left with is melancholy as “the sounds on a winter’s night” in Woolf’s phrase.

Perhaps, I miss the sunny and mild winters of Istanbul. The city’s chaos, colors, and life that winter cannot take away. Or the evening tea that my parents often have with my sister, niece and nephew, and brother every day after dinner. Am I missing out? The other day, I did reminisce about the days when we used to have a stove and roast chestnuts in our living room. Carkifelek or some other reality competition show in the background. It can’t be the holidays; we don’t celebrate Christmas.

But I digress.

This winter, a call from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has alleviated my yearly winter blues. You know, the game-show where contestants receive $1 million if they answer 14 questions correctly. I promise, this is not a chicken soup for the soul story.

Or maybe it is.

Seven or eight years ago, when my family and I were deeply immersed in an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, I decided to apply to be on the show. I had just finished my first semester of graduate school in Michigan and was visiting my family in Istanbul in the winter. During a commercial break, my brother jokingly said, “Why don’t you apply?”

“Yeah, right?” was my answer. “What are the chances?”

After entertaining the thought, we decided to go ahead and submit an application. Merely for fun. Something to remember. As I was only visiting, I didn’t even have a Turkish number. We used my brother’s phone number instead.

And we’d forgotten about the application.

Until a week later when we received a call from the show, inviting me as a contestant.

I got excited. I made plans. I was ready.

But I never went.

I had my flight back to the U.S. in a few days. I didn’t have time to give it a try. “It’s a bummer; it would have been fun,” we said, and we moved on.

We’d forgotten about the application once again.

Until today. This morning, I woke up to a message by my brother telling me that he’d received a call from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. “They asked if you can participate as a contestant!!! AGAIN!!” he wrote. “8 YEARS LATER?” I messaged back. He said he’d told them that I was in the U.S., and that was it. My brother and I remembered the day when we submitted the application and had a laugh. What were the chances really? How ironic was it that I could not go yet again?

Then I moved on with my day. With a warm fuzz of contentment wrapped around my heart for some strange reason.

But then it hit me why when I was reading an interview with writer Elif Shafak.

When asked whether “London felt like home to you,” she responded:

It does – yet it is also possible to have portable homelands. If you’re in self-imposed exile, it is sad but enriches you intellectually and spiritually. I will always carry Istanbul in my soul.

Elsewhere, Shafak wrote:

I am not claiming that having a dual or multiple sense of home is easy. There are things it takes away from you. But there are things it adds, too, intellectually and spiritually. Instead of anchoring ourselves in one place or one identity, we can connect with the parts of each place that call out the best in us, and perhaps become a walking bridge between cultures that might seem worlds apart to others’ eyes. After all, some of us make homes out of rabbit holes.

Reading about the myriad ways in which others make meaning of home assumes another dimension in the winter. Like Shafak, I’ve always believed that one can have multiple homes, and I do think that it’s a privilege to call multiple places home. But why does it get particularly difficult in the winter?

A little reflection goes a long way. I knew why.

I realized that winter in a small American town often magnifies the things that having multiple homes takes away from me: family time and shenanigans, movie night with best friends, game-show nights on cold winter nights, and so forth.

The call from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire found me on such a day when I was longing for the things that were 5,473 miles away from me.

As strange as this may sound, the call warmed my heart and alleviated my winter blues.

It felt like a call from the past, from 8 years ago, confirming my ties to one of my homes, taking me back to that winter day years ago.

I also thought that the call in itself was symbolic for a “self-imposed exile” like me whose eligibility for anything is almost always questionable.

And so this is how I ended up here, writing this post on a chilly Sunday. My cat is curled up next to me, asleep. Leonard Cohen is playing in the background.

This is home too, from which I’m writing a thank you letter to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, I suppose? Who would have thought?