So the last two years: Snow shoeing with jacket pockets crammed with elk jerky, summer thunderstorms, learning to cast into rivers to keep up with a guy I liked, rodeos, sleeping in the back of a truck, documenting life in a Montana ranching town as a weekly newspaper editor, more adventure, winter, more winter; distilling long, long-held opposing views that have nothing to do with what I initially thought I was writing about; long nights chewing on a pen and looking at a blank screen, late meetings, early mornings, a single lamp light on in an office to get a paper out the next day; falling in love, sunrises that make my heart burst, walking to work in the snow with a cup of coffee, huckleberry margaritas and spa music in a clawfoot bathtub after town council meetings; crying of stress, crying of happiness; homecoming football games at dusk, lines of yellow school buses going to prom; plunging into lakes in the dead of winter, more love, more snow.

In 2010 I started a blog I called Homefires, based on the lifting of this one line in a song by the Canadian band, The Acorn – Not looking behind to ensure the homefires aren’t shrinking – because those words seemed to bring together everything I wanted to write about at that time in my early 30s. About going between New Zealand and California. About leaving places when leaves started to golden. And mostly that sense of being torn between mountain towns and coastal communities that I had come to love, of forever being an interloper where everyone else seems to have a cemented role. Of leaving pieces of myself all over both sides of the equator. Of balancing restlessness, with an acute longing to just belong somewhere and have a garden and a dog and a slow-cooker.

Homefires morphed into a weekly blog for stuff.co.nz  – Sweet Home California – when I came back to the States in 2013 and wrote about adjusting to life in my homeland and travels through the northwest and east to an island in Michigan  before moving to Montana for the winter. That next summer I took at job as the editor of the Philipsburg Mail in the southwest corner of the state and moved into an 1890s house once owned by the town midwife, Mary Morrison who, I’m told, helped more than 30 babies be born in my living room a century ago. Homefires became the title of a regular column I would bash out on deadline mornings in a poetic fit, about adjusting to seasons, the beauty of autumn in cattle country, that old, unsettled longing for a 13-hour plane trip somewhere with crashing waves; assembling a lawn mower for the first time in my life and the ache of love I have felt for this tiny house with peeling paint when I wash dishes and look out past snow-covered roofs to the Pintler ranges.

There’s too much to tell about the last two years. But maybe the highlights of all these seasons in a small, Montana town – that has been just enough of a safe harbor, balanced with a dying, old west wildness that I have come to respect and grip onto myself a little bit – are just better in photos.

Here are a few.