Saturday was a date night: The Husband and I had booked tickets for a party at the local yacht club, which we attended last year and which yielded a priceless photo taken by a friend, an immersion in the ocean, and a foot full (mine) of sea urchin quills. This year, we booked the sitter early so we could go to dinner nearby beforehand.

We went to a place I’d gone to with friends over two years ago–which sounds crazy to say, that we’ve even been here long enough to have gone somewhere “years ago”–so it was my second round there, too. I had forgotten how the owner tried to make meals there an experience–last time I’d been with a big group so the treatment was spread out more broadly. This time, though, we were told, “Welcome home” no less than half a dozen times, including when we left. TH was over it, seeing as how we don’t live in that restaurant and neither of us likes being treated too familiarly by strangers.

We haven’t stopped saying it to each other since.

Which is appropriate, really, given that we are home these days, and looking for our home still. We’ve been chasing a few houses, off and on, eyes glued to the real estate website and minds wavering back and forth over all the old issues: finances, location, size. It’s a decision that feels–and is–monumental, given the money and commitment required for it, and our choice–to assent to a search, then step in gradually, then just, maybe, immerse ourselves–is weighed down by the thousand other tiny choices it entails, statements about making Sydney our home for a bit longer or much longer, our original three-years-later departure date fading in the rearview mirror.

So maybe we’ll get a house soon? I don’t know. This whole process is crazy, full of bids and auctions and anxiety and back-and-forth. The last time we did this was for our first house. It was just the two of us but we were planning for the future. Now there are four of us and we have things like future teenagers, and possible high schools, to consider. It’s an exciting, terrifying chapter.

So Saturday night, after we were welcomed home upon leaving dinner, we headed down the street to the beach. We joined friends and poured drinks and talked. This year, no one jumped in the water–a recent storm has left it too polluted. (Which is to say that the local beach smells like a pile of gorilla shit. It’s sad, but it will change.) Instead, we stood in our bare feet on the shore, bottles of wine in buckets in the sand, and one of us (not me) who has always been good at recognising the beauty of small moments said, “I love this place. It’s like home.”

It is. We have adult gatherings there; Little Brother’s last birthday party was there; we go there on Fridays after school and take flying leaps of bravery there. We do life there.

Home is growing to be a bigger place than I ever realised, full of sand and water and FaceTime calls and uncertainty and life. Beaches, harbours, flights across the world, internet voice apps, text chains, Skype counselling sessions, fires and floods. Frederick Buechner wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” In other words, welcome home.