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“I once was lost, but now am found,” reads a framed canvas on our bookshelf. I bought it back in 2016, before we left Atlanta, when I thought we had found our home–the first house we bought as a couple, the doorway we crossed with the boys when they were fresh from the hospital, the rooms in which they cried as newborns and between which we shuffled, half-awake and -coherent, as new parents.

That canvas was packed for our move across the world a few months later, and now it sits in the soft winter sunlight while I glitch over whether I should put on some Christmas music to enjoy in front of the fire in June.

It’s not so much how we found ourselves here, but how we’ve been found here.

Because those moments don’t go away–the glitches, the double-takes, the recognitions that this is not what we knew, but it’s what we know, and it’s where we are known. Driving down the (left side of the) road, realising half of the people I know are asleep because it’s the middle of the night of a different day where they are. Translating (poorly) the temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius. Hearing an accent, wondering why they’re talking like that, and remembering it’s not an accent, not here.

A few weekends ago, we voted in our first election. I geared up for long lines and boy whines and, instead, was greeted by sausages on the barbecue, a bake sale in progress, and a line that was shorter than our explanation to the boys of what was about to happen. We headed home the way we came–on foot–a few minutes after we headed there, heads spinning at the ease of it.

Sometimes it feels like things should be harder. And they are, sometimes. But I’m so grateful for the many ways in which they are not.

For Little Brother’s Saturday morning soccer games, populated by our own little family of families who’ve met on these pitches for over two years now. For the same group convening the next morning for a birthday party, discussing the school’s light show from the night before–one of my very favourite nights of the year, where we’re all bundled together on blankets, gazing up at the sky together.

The Kid came home from school the other day, detailing his “problems and benefits” as he always does, with a big benefit to tell: they finally passed the ball to him during a class netball game and he went on to score four times, cheered on by the kids who only thought they knew what he could do before but are clearly still learning. I think about how long that process is, really knowing someone, how it can go on forever, filled with tiny moments of surprise, confirmation, growing comfort.

I think about how what I loved about New York was the ability to walk several miles without seeing one face I knew; the anonymity I craved that comforted me then. How now, all I see are faces I know. How belonging is never complete, and I sure haven’t felt it most of my life, but how, here, in the most unlikely of places, we’ve been found by it.