Finding Home Again

Warning: This is a monster post. So grab your favourite beverage and settle in. It’s worth the read.

2024: It’s been a few months now since my husband and I moved into our 1935 cottage in Southern Tasmania. It’s been as much a mental change as it has been physical.

For the last ten years, probably longer, I have felt unsettled. Well, maybe not unsettled exactly. More like, ‘what’s next’?

When we moved (home) to Australia from the U.S. ten years ago, we moved to Sydney. The decision was based on the fact that I was familiar with Sydney, having lived there previously, and it was where my sister lived.  We knew we wouldn’t be there long term. Four years, tops, because my husband and I planned to travel full time, once our daughter was off to Uni. I don’t even think we unpacked all of our boxes. We knew we weren’t staying.

When that time came, we donated most of our worldly goods to a family in need, a decision we made right before our lease was up, then stored the sentimental and the hard to replace. We packed up the car with what we’d need to travel full time, and off we went. We were moving again.

This time, we were constantly moving. Every day was planning the next day, the next week, the next month. We really had no set plans. It was all just moving.

Moving. Moving. Moving.

 

 

By the time mid-2019 came around, we decided to find a place to base ourselves. We were getting antsy living out of a suitcase all the time. Tasmania was cheaper than the rest of Australia and, since it was the one place we kept coming back to for housesits, it made sense. We found a fully-furnished house on the east coast (Orford) and were relieved to be stopped when COVID hit. We bought office equipment. I wrote a book, then two. After two years, we were settled in. So much so, we arranged for our storage unit to be shipped to us in Tasmania.

Five years flew past. At some point, we had decided it was time to stop moving. We liked the idea of having a home base, and post-COVID, we weren’t in a rush to travel again. The property we rented was offered to us to buy, and we considered it. Seriously. Finally, we reached back out to the homeowner and asked the question: how much? But then things got complicated legally with the neighbours next door and, when we really thought about where we wanted to be, we realised we liked another region more than the east coast.

So, we bought the house in the Huon Valley. We moved what we had, bought basic furniture that suited our needs, and began to unpack boxes that hadn’t seen daylight in ten years.

It has felt, ironically, a bit unsettling for me. It’s almost like I don’t know how to feel about it.

My husband has a saying that has bothered me over the years, but now it makes sense. He never calls a place ‘home’. As in, ‘let’s go home’. It’s always: ‘let’s go back to the house’.

The longer I pondered this, I realised that I have felt the same way. There’s never been a home. Not for a very long time.

Even now, the idea of ‘what’s next’, continues to swirl. It’s a concerted effort to remember that this house is now ours. We’re not going anywhere. Certainly not anytime soon. We can do whatever we like with this house, to this garden. I can plant in the ground, not just in pots. I can paint the walls and not worry about repainting them later (not that I ever did that in the last ten years). We don’t have to worry if we scratch something or move something, thinking we will have to move it back later, fix it later. It’s a mindset change. A big one. But it goes deeper than that for me.

Turns out, I have always been moving.

Growing up, I was ‘an Army brat’. My step-father (who came into my life when I was five) was in the army for twenty years. Most of my childhood years was spent moving every eighteen months. We moved between Sydney and the Hunter Valley during that time and, when my step-father finally retired, my parents bought a property in the Hunter Valley. It was 140 acres with a small, dilapidated old house. Intially, Mum refused to live there until it was habitable, so my step-dad worked hard to make it so. Mum was a city girl who was, in her mind, moving to the middle of nowhere. But with her touches, her love, her dedication to my dad’s dream, it became home.

The property’s formal name was Rosedale, although Mum struggled to keep any roses alive, it was so drought prone. To the rest of us, it was lovingly referred to (and still is) as The Farm. That was it. Just the farm.

To me, it was home.

I lived at Rosedale for six years, off and on. Out of my siblings, I was the only one who lived there for any length of time. I daresay I was the one that had the deepest connection to it. Even after moving overseas, the farm was my home base.  It was the place that would be there, no matter what.

 

 

But when my Mum died in 2001, the place went to ruin. My step-father lost all interest in it. The heart and soul of it –  my mother –  was gone. Why bother?

And yet, it was still home to me. The place I always went home to whenever I returned to Australia. It was the one place that held my heart, even if I owned property myself somewhere else in the world. I felt that the farm would always be there.

Until it wasn’t.

In 2012, my step-father died and, in his will, we were instructed to sell the farm. I was devastated. I considered buying it myself when he got ill, but I was still living overseas at the time. I had no one to manage the property for me. Plus, I had visions that my (fucked up) brother would come and destroy anything that was there, with the help of his trial-bike club, especially since I wouldn’t be close enough to notice. But my step-father wasn’t interested in selling it to me. He wanted to sell it outright. Be done with it. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. (I learned later that he wanted none of the kids to have it.)

It wasn’t until I saw a therapist in 2019 that I learned how much the farm meant to me.

Apparently I had been searching for that home base for a while. I needed that home base. I needed the roots. The houses I had bought overseas weren’t quite right either. Apparently, I needed space. I needed a garden. I needed to feel that solid base, to feel I was no longer moving. Even with the houses I bought myself, I never had that sense. There was always ‘the next house’. The next plan.

The first house I bought was in Texas, with my ex-husband. We bought a three bedroom house on the outskirts of Austin, when I was 23. I hadn’t planned on buying a house at that age.  Pfft. I wasn’t even considering buying a house. But my ex-mother-in-law needed to invest in a property so that she could avoid paying capital gains tax, after selling a property with my father in law (now her ex) in California. So, she invested her money by buying with us, putting the down payment in, and BOOM. We had a house. But lingering in the back of my mind was the idea that this was an investment. The house was not really mine (ours). It was my mother-in-laws and she’d probably want her investment back at some point.

The next house I bought was after my ex-husband left me, about seven years later. We sold the investment house. After two years of renting, I used my share of the investment property sale, to buy a house for my daughter and I.

It was a quaint, two-storey, blue house, with a white picket fence. It was in a neighbourhood right out of a television sitcom. I worked hard to make it our own. For four years, it was almost home. When my (now) husband moved in, the house wasn’t quite big enough for the three of us. And I was tired of the neighbour sitting on her back steps, peering into my kitchen window.

So, we sold my house and built a house together. It was in one of those ‘cookie cutter’ neighbourhoods, in an adjacent suburb to Austin, Texas. The house was large on a small block. There wasn’t a lot of room in the back yard for a garden, and we backed up to a busy road. Don’t even get me started on the Homeowner Association and all of its restrictions!

 

My husband bounced off the walls. The noise from the road was crazy. He was unsettled as soon as we moved in, which made us all feel unsettled. Still, I tried to make it home. I painted walls. We bought furniture together to make it ours. But it still didn’t feel right. Instead, we both felt like we were trying to keep up with the Jones, living in what felt was like a model home.

When the opportunity came along to move home to Australia, we didn’t hesitate. I guess all three of us were all looking for a fresh start. Something new, as our life was not as any of us imagined.

We packed everything we had and moved to a rental in Sydney. A place that was only meant to be for a year, until we found our footing. We lasted in that house for six months. You’d think we’d learned from the last house, but with this one, the traffic was insane. We found another house, a little further out, backing up to a national park, but that too, was a temporary move. We were there for three years, until my daughter finished high school, and the homeowners returned from their work stint in Switzerland.

Somehow, for the twenty years since leaving home, I had been constantly moving and now, I was moving again.

That’s when we decided to travel full time indefinitely. Not just moving, but moving, moving, moving. Full time travel lasted three years.

But now… we have stopped.

 

 

We are now in this quaint cottage in southern Tasmania with its amazing (if overrun) garden, and a creek at the boundary. It’s a place I can call my own. While it’s not a place with the land I wanted, it’s the home base we craved. It’s a place we own. A place we have no intention of moving from, anytime soon. Here, I know I can plant a garden. I can paint walls. I can put up art. I can set up a sewing corner. I can create a place to write, a place I can come back to anytime I want.

I am hoping that someday, eventually, I will feel that this is home.

We’ve even named our little cottage property ‘Rosedale Cottage’, a take on my parent’s farm. Because this is the place where roses are abundant. And, when I think of it, I think my Mum would have loved it too. Maybe that’s the home base I’ve been searching for… a place my Mum would have loved and wanted to stay too.

 

Update: 2025. It’s definitely become home, for both my husband and I. We can’t imagine living anywhere else.