For the past few days, the four of us have been away on one of our domestic holidays here in Australia, meant to expose us to more of the beautiful country that is also home (and to serve as an alternative to getting on yet another plane). We (The Husband) drove from Sydney to Canberra, the nation’s capital, then on to what Aussies refer to as “the snow,” an area comprised of a few towns and a few mountains and a lot of cold.

The whole journey takes about six hours, but since none of us can stand to be trapped in a moving vehicle together that long (and given, as The Kid and I are, to bouts of motion sickness), we split it in half on the way there and back by overnighting in Canberra, which meant we bookended our trip in the same hotel–the one TK referred to as “luxury” when he announced that it “totally rocked out, man.”

We began watching Coco there, and we finished it there. We got takeaway breakfast across the street (by which I mean, TH fetched it while the boys and I sat in the room): same order twice. We slept in the same kind of bed in the same kind of room and I luxuriated in the same kind of bathtub and it was all unfamiliar then familiar, foreign then known. Returning can be a beautiful thing.

Especially when you’re loath to leave your comfort zone, a movement TK and I especially struggle with, but we’re all sort of becoming…experts at it? I mean, when you consider that we’ve moved across the world and are traipsing across what was a brand new hemisphere and country and is now…a comfort zone.

“It’s okay, James, we’re trying something new!” Little Brother tells TK when he hesitates, which is often, on the entrance to a path of unfamiliarity, and though I’m sure he heard it from either me or TH, I’m equally sure I need to keep hearing it from him, mascot of encouragement and adventure that he somehow is (he doesn’t get it from me).

When we were picking up gloves for TK at the ski store in the snow, the clerk observed the boys then turned to TH and me. “Asperger’s?” he asked, nodding toward TK, and I nodded in return, already facing the battle of getting two kids up a mountain and not up for discussing the intricacies of the most recent iteration of the DSM and its erasure of that part of the spectrum. I braced myself for whatever he would say next, but I didn’t need to. “I have three boys on the spectrum,” he said. “And if it weren’t for different, you wouldn’t have Einstein…or me!” he concluded with a belly laugh, and I thought about how, no matter the distance we travel, some things are always the same.

They’re the points of recognition: people who are strangers yet know us because our storylines connect, be it through a spectrum or a nationality or a shared struggle. The scenery tends to repeat itself: at one point in our drive, TH commented that we could’ve been in California. (Also, those green signs on highways? They must have some central manufacturer who distributes them to the entire world.) And small towns, don’t they always look the same? (“Quaint,” some call it. “Dire,” I reply.)

LB has been coming up with his own interpretations of God recently, which has proved endlessly endearing and entertaining. “God’s story…it’s so long,” he told me last night while he was fighting sleep. “It’s so long it never ends.” I was not expecting to be hit in the face with this profundity, especially since I was still reeling from TK’s request, moments before, that I not die before him.

But he’s right: this story is so long, wrapping around on itself and repeating so many of the same plot points and themes. Like how, no matter how many times we wanted to throw each other off that mountain, we still ended up together, in the same room, piling up in bed together and waking up that way. Or how, each year, TH and I celebrate the day we made each other promises we had no way of understanding. Or how a hot bath and a glass of champagne are a reliable short-term cure for pretty much anything.

TK gets annoyed when I tell him something I’ve already said before–like how the Spit Bridge is going up, or the traffic-changing truck is driving by, or that I love him. “I already know that,” he says, yet often, afterward, he will burrow next to me without another word. And I need it too, to keep hearing and relearning the same truths: that we can never venture so far that we are not loved beyond what we deserve and covered by a grace that always bring us home.