Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 15: Home
And then one day, getting on for a year after we’d left, we pulled up outside our own house.
We had damage to show for it. Small dents and tears all over the car and the van, and a matching set across our two bodies — the ankle, the knee, the feet, the various things the country had taken its modest tax on along the way. But nothing that mattered. Nothing structural. We came home, the two of us, better and stronger than we’d left. That part I’m sure of.
We were also desperately, hopelessly behind on the house. A year is a long time to not be somewhere.
Out on the road we’d met a particular kind of person more than once — people who’d done a big lap, finally come home, pulled up outside their own house, sat there looking at it, and found they could no longer quite remember why it was a thing they had. Why they’d want it. And turned around, and left again. We met several of those. The road does that to some people; it gets in and it doesn’t come out, and the house never makes sense to them again.
We didn’t do that. I want that on the record. We stayed.
Although. There were health things to attend to — there always are, after a year, because it’s genuinely hard work staying on top of your body out there, and what you defer on the road comes due when you stop. Scans. Specialists. The odd day procedure. The ordinary administration of being alive and no longer young, which the trip had let us pretend wasn’t waiting.