A short trip.

It was a good trip, but it was too short. It's hard to assert that when it takes fourteen hours just to cross the ocean (fourteen hours during which, I might mention, that my daughter decided to cut her first tooth with no complaints at all) and another two to get to our first destination, but all of that time on the plane was not wasted. How can it be? I was visiting family.

Our first stop is always Idaho to visit my best friend, Sarah. She and her husband Jason always open their home so beautifully it feels churlish to even suggest staying in a hotel. Sarah and I are technically cousins but she's always been more like a sister to me – even when we were children and we regarded each other with mutual suspicion. It was only when we were teenagers that we became really close, and I couldn't tell you exactly when it happened, just that I'm thankful it did.

My goodness. I miss my best friend so viscerally sometimes. It's hard to believe we've lived in different places for seven years, because it feels like just yesterday we were flatmates navigating boys, boohoos, and brouhahas. It is nice to know that all those years later, married and motherhood notwithstanding, we can still stay up until four in the morning talking and drinking Emergen-C like old times! I still got it, baby. Who cares I needed, er, six coffees the next day.

Her babies are so grown up now. Emma has words. Emma can make choices. Last time I saw that kid, she was a five month old spud in a pink dress. She doesn't look like a potato anymore, that's for sure: she's all legs and ponytails and little girl logic. Like when I asked her "How's it going?" while she was eating her yoghurt cup and she indignantly replied, "Down my THROAT!" Well. That was...accurate. Haha. George was a reluctant talker by comparison. He had a few key favorites: "Mommy? Up? Down? Car?" Everything was a question. My favorite, for the record, was "Foffee?" Oh man. Everything a grown up drank was foffee.

We drank lots of foffee.

We were lucky enough to have time to catch up with my cousin Jesse and his wife (also named Sarah) and their boys Jesse Jay and Toby. I can hardly believe how big their boys are! Time flies when kids are concerned. Turn your back on them for two seconds and they are tax-paying voters. Sheesh.

We also had dinner with my mom's eldest sister who lives in the area. Aunt Karen and Uncle Tony are in some of my earliest memories and it was lovely to organize a meal. Piper loved my Aunt Karen – it was first time I'd ever seen my kid dive into someone's arms – and it was nice to catch up with my grown cousins Brian and his wife Nicole, and Danny and his wife LaChelle, and all my little second cousins *deep breath*: Brianna, Annalynne, Zack, Zeke, and Andrew!

It was way too soon for it to be over. I felt like I had only scrabbled a little at catching up, and I was swallowing a big lump in my throat as we hugged quick and tight at the Flying M, Sar going in her home direction with her red mug, and my matching white one safe in my suitcase so that someday we could drink tea together from a distance, and it would make us think of one another. I indulged my tears very quietly on the plane and watched as the propellor bore us upward and over the mountains, west toward the land of my birth.

We had rented a car in Idaho so we could get around and we did a lot of getting around. I felt a lot more confident in town now that I've had to drive a bit, and it helped to have lots of practice being on the right-hand side of the road after, um, six years driving on the left! Unfortunately we ended up accidently getting upsold at Avis (BAD AVIS) which cost us a lot of extra money! We learned our lesson after that, though, and when we'd said our goodbyes to our Idaho family and friends and headed west, we were prepared. I stared Mr Car Rental Guy down in the Portland airport and made him understand that under no circumstances did we want to have to pay anything extra. Voila! Glare worked. Boom. Funnily enough, we liked the car we had chosen better than the "upgrade" option.

So: home. Home as in the place I grew up. Driving south after four years away made me really look at everything. So much had changed! The city I moved to out of high school was still navigable but peppered with large new stores: Cabela's, Lowe's, new Starbucks on every other corner. It felt like a lot of bigger, bolder businesses had moved in around the fringes. We don't really have fringes here (everything is city or suburbs) and it was strange to see it all so open.

I was so excited to see my family that even though our four-hour-drive-in-theory took roughly six and a half hours (two baby feeds, a dinner with my gorgeous friend Katie and her partner David, another baby feed), and we had to stop at the hotel and check in, I wouldn't even let Mr Poppleton take our luggage up to the room. It was only twelve more miles at that point and it was good, clear freeway driving, all through the mountains. My eyelids were stuck to my eyes, and I felt like a thousand years' worth of travel gunk was stuck all over my person, but IT WAS ONLY TWELVE MORE MILES. I kept the car idling during check in and maybe, just maybe, I sped a little. (Or a lot. Shh. It's the interstate. It's smoooove.)

My parents live on a piece of property down a lane in a town so teensy it barely has a post office. When I got to the end of their driveway and saw the lights on it was a lot of effort to remember to get the baby out of the car first, not just go running in there willy-nilly. Still, after four years, it was pretty amazing to go running up to the front door in my little travelling outfit, baby squished in my arms (and totally confused at being woken up and then taken JOGGING), to hug first my sisters, then my dad, then my mama. So wonderful to see them after so many years.

All of my sisters are grown up girls. It is amazing. And they LOVED Piper, which is even better. Boy, she sure got a lot of love when she visited!

I made myself useful: we cooked a dinner for my folks, I made cupcakes and a cake (though my mom absolutely kills at cake-making, so I should have stuck with a pavlova or something), and I even helped my dad out by driving the tractor behind him so he could shovel gravel into the potholes in the driveway. Yep. I drove a tractor. I even got to third gear! (Well, it was still pretty slow).

The rest of the trip was short but crammed with visiting. I met my family's church friends, celebrated my mom's birthday party in style (J3 and I made her a tombstone cake, complete with "RIP" and fifty black candles mourning the death of her youth – her idea, not mine!), went fabric shopping with my Aunt Rose, forced W to tell me about her crush over icecream (where I ran into a friend from junior high!), bought a panda hat for J4 with little claw mittens that are attached (!), did a late-night talk and Dutch Bros run with J3, and spent far too little time with J2, who was busy with family of her own. I understand, but I'd still hoped to take her out for coffee or lunch! I got to visit with my cousins Matthew, Jonothan, Angela and even briefly Adam. I got to cuddle my nephew Johnny and my nieces Sissy, Jayden, and for a precious half-hour, little Maggie, who is just so tiny. (Piper was never that tiny!) We visited my Grandma D and saw my Grandma B a couple of times, and though it is never enough, the time I have with my family, it is always precious.

I also visited my grandfather's grave. I don't take flowers to his grave, but he wasn't much for flowers anyway. I think I'm the only member of my family who goes up there. I cleaned his gravestone and told him about Piper, about where I live now, what I'm doing. I like to think he'd like my visits, but I don't visit for him. I go up there for me. He is buried on the hill under a tree and the sun shone so brightly during my visit that it made the trees ache with color.

On our last day in Oregon, we drove north quietly, and I thought about why it didn't feel like home. I clearly don't belong in rural Southern Oregon anymore. I'm from there but not an Oregonian. I documented our last day there: the maple bar from The Happy Donut, coffee from Pony Espresso (my high-school haunt!), breakfast at Brail's, a quick lunch at Cafe Yumm!, a pit stop at Starbucks in Keizer, then the horror of Piper throwing up everywhere and us nearly missing the flight. I left Oregon in a hurry, panicked and perspiring. I was relieved to get to Los Angeles, relieved to be on the flight to Sydney, and more relieved to discover that our checking in at the Alaskan Airlines gate meant we'd been put into premium economy! We had leg room! Consequently, Piper slept for ten of the fourteen hours of that flight (as did we).THAT is a good international flight! I had a good visit but I felt alien, other. Not American, no matter what my passport says. I felt weird.

But all of that displaced feeling disappeared when we finally landed in Sydney. I miss my family terribly. But I was home. And the shape of the gum trees scabbing the land beneath the plane was a welcome sight; the sticky air that enveloped us as soon as we walked off the plane a breath of life to our dried-out lungs; the shriek and chatter of the birds a glorious refrain. We cleared customs in no time flat, got on a train, and met Mr Poppleton's parents at the café to catch up and say hello. Home. Home where I can unpack and lovingly gaze at my new sewing stuff, home where the air smells just musky and just sweet, home where the cockatoos strut up and down my balcony like the cheeky devils they are. I used to think the birds here made such a racket. Now I've come to realize, all the other birds are just too quiet.

I am so glad to be home. But I am so glad to have gone, too.

It was a good trip.