I find myself making a familiar, heart-learned left-turn onto a pale, gravel lane. The wheels of my grey Mazda crunch the dirt noisily. I take another left-turn, careful to steer my car onto higher ground to avoid bottoming out on a dry creek bed. The creek I used to splash in as a young child, after a heavy summer rain.

A rare shower of rain in the previous week has encouraged fresh and shallow grass to blanket the parched ground. The skeletal trees still cry drought, but a soft green hue has made the landscape a little less demoralising.

I park close to the front door and walk inside. The wooden door clatters shut in the same way I have known for 27 years. The walls smell of childhood and my mother’s arms extend to me with the same promise of unconditional love as they did when she first held me.

I am home.

But only for a brief moment.

Soon I start to feel restless. I am safe and comfortable, but I am overwhelmed with the awareness that who I am no longer seems to fit neatly inside these walls and I mourn. I chastise my heart for its wanderlust and my mind for its constant straying to other places and other people.

Home is no longer the four walls I grew up in or the three family members who grew here with me.

Home falls into fragments and I can’t seem to reconcile the pieces. What is home if it is not whole?

The days pass and I ignore my unsettling discovery. I stand stubbornly against the pull of all the other places I have existed and try to fit myself back into this place.

One evening Dad walks into the room. He’s walking down the lane to let the horse into a larger paddock. Do I want to come? With nothing better to do, I go.

We walk down the lane side by side. A bent sliver of sun-reflecting moon clings to shadowed moon. Dusk has all but disappeared behind the horizon. The evening star arrives in the darkening sky like a bright messenger, awakening the celestial lights.

We deviate from the lane to fulfil our equine errand, and instead of turning our faces towards home I find myself following my father to the end of the lane and further still as he continues onto the bitumen road. He tugs me to lie onto the road next to him.

The warmth the road has collected throughout the clear, blue day radiates through my clothes and onto my skin. I settle my head onto the hard surface, alert to the night noises, ready to move at any sound of an engine. Ever so slowly I relax as night quiet steeps in, remembering that this is a sleepy country road.

I allow my eyes to look directly up into the light sprayed sky. The endless, incomprehensible distance between me and those stars remind me of my smallness. And as I lie under that unfathomable sky, something happens. It happens imperceptibly and it is not until later than I become aware of the shift.

My heart begins to remember Home.

It remembers that Home is not shelter or safety or people.

Home is a promise.

A promise that all the fragments of home that I find on this earth will be reunited and restored.

Held together for eternity in the arms of Love.