I sat down with a map of the U.S., since that's where I'm a citizen. At the time, my parents were having health challenges, so I made a list of the cities from which I could fly directly to where they were living at the time (they're both much better now, thankfully). I wanted to live within an hour and a half or so from the airport, because any farther than that would be really inconvenient. This gave me a list of a couple dozen areas.

From there, I looked at weather. I despise being overly hot, especially (but by no means exclusively) if it's humid, but I don't mind the cold at all. I would miss snow if I didn't get it every year. That narrowed it down to about a dozen, if I remember correctly.

I prefer not to live in crowded places or dense cities, and this knocked a couple more places off the list (it's too dense for me almost everywhere within an hour and a half of JFK in NYC for example). I also wanted to be somewhere reasonably close to "stuff to do outside."

When I got it down to 6, I ranked them based on places I had some connection to and decided to go visit them all, looking for wherever felt like a good fit. I didn't make it past the first stop, though. I went and visited the place on the top of my list, which I had spent some time near before, met some like-minded people and moved three months later.

Ironically I'm not still in touch with the community I first wanted to connect with, but I got plugged into the area in other ways and made connections with other groups. After some immediate family chaos (several moves, a couple deaths, a divorce), my mom actually ended up moving out to the same area, and I think by now this has become "home."