We should have completed on the house in Malta in April. That got pushed to the end of July, which set off a chain of further delays, and we only moved here at the end of October. If you count from when we found a buyer, it’s been October to October. Now we are finally here, the long way round.

We arrived to good weather, which has lately become a given. Our stuff had already been delivered to the garage in boxes, so the hunt could begin from day one. Every day since has been a hunt for the one thing in the boxes we needed right then: the second half of the scratching post, the pots and pans, the drill, then the drill bits, which are still missing in action. And then there were the things we were surprised to find, like the silver foot of the wine carafe we thought was lost in Malta.

The carafe itself stayed hidden for so long that it became a running gag between Hass and me. It finally turned up in the second-to-last box in the garage. That doesn’t mean we’ve unpacked everything, only that we’ve opened every box without writing on it, and some with writing on them, and learned that any label not written by Hass or me was a suggestion rather than the truth.

The rental has a ground floor with the garage and studio space, plus two more floors. We live on the first floor and sleep on the top one. The stairs are something else and make the whole process twice as hard. My knee has opinions about them every single day.

Internet arrived three days ago. The water pressure is awful, but there’s a bathtub that my by-now-far-too-wide behind actually fits into, and that takes the sting out of the water pressure for me. The windows hold up to the rain, and after two years of glamping with waterfalls in the middle of the living area and smaller rivers through nearly every room, that matters most of all. It’s getting cold, and right now we don’t have enough electricity to run the heater and everything else at the same time, so we pick. We knew the renovations weren’t finished when we moved in, and our landlord, Ricardo, fixes things as fast as we find them, so that’s already on its way. I don’t mind that everything still isn’t quite right. To be honest, I’m just so grateful we’re here.

The cats needed two days to act ‘normal’ again, or what passes for normal with them, which is record time for our furry overlords. I spent four nights sleeping with them, two on the floor before I upgraded myself, and by extension them, to the much-preferred couch, to make the change easier and to make sure they were actually okay and not just pretending. Now I sleep next to my husband again, in a proper bed, and I think being next to each other and going to bed at the same time again makes this feel more like home too.

It’s so quiet here. At night there are bats and house martins. The light comes and goes slowly because the sun rises behind one mountain and sets behind the other, so there’s no real sunrise or sunset, but it’s pretty. Nearly everything here is: the stars, the cloud that swallows the village at 400-odd metres, the small streams, the moss and the wildlife I’m discovering bit by bit.

As I said to my friends in Spain, maybe I should get myself a birdwatching book. Then again, all I would log is a grey one with white feathers and a white one with grey feathers. I have no clue about birds. I might recognise a chicken. Ricardo is going to help me with another species, though. He’s agreed to show us his ducks once the weather is a bit drier, and I can’t wait. I think he thinks I’m obsessed with ducks, but I’m just drinking in everything new, and I do love animals, so maybe he’s right after all.

Unpacking is harder than usual because most of our furniture stayed in Malta. Ricardo has let us use some lovely art deco wooden pieces, which makes me happier than it makes Hass. However, it’s still not enough to find homes for all the stuff we drag around with us. I suspect books and my studio will be the bulk of it in the end, but so far it’s been clothes and kitchen things. We have no place for two-thirds of it at the moment, so we’re roughly sorting it into the rooms where it should end up in time. In spring I’ll start painting the walls and sprucing up the floors. By then I should have recovered enough from the past two years.

Besides unpacking, we tried to give ourselves a bit of time to get to know our new surroundings and the people who live here. In that spirit we tasted some local wine, and since we were still looking for the cooking equipment, we went to cafés, bars and churrasqueiras. We rode the new motorbikes around the villages here, and we both think we made the right decision to come back. We always said we’d never go back anywhere, and if we ever did, it would be Portugal. Sometimes I do miss the sea, though.

This is the first time since 2002 that I haven’t lived near it. As a trade-off, it’s also the first time in maybe seven years that I’ve watched the leaves turn orange and red and the seasons change gradually. Malta’s version was cold and wet, briefly green, sweltering, then cold and wet again. And though the cold and wet was probably the shortest season, it felt like the longest.

On Halloween, since we couldn’t watch horror films and had nowhere to go, we went out in town and ended up talking with Nuno, a fellow metalhead we’d met at Padeiros do Rock two weeks earlier while dropping off some stuff. At some point while we were out or already asleep, the house got egged. We weren’t the only ones on the street, so it wasn’t personal. Most likely nobody opened the door to hand out sweets, and the kids collected what they were owed. Unfortunately we only found it the next morning, already baked on by the sun.

That same day, our first weekend as Caria residents, there was a travelling market in town. Nuno had tipped us off the night before. We walked the streets, browsed the stalls and ended up at the churrasqueira tent with box wine decanted into a bottle, a chicken split between us and a view that confirmed our choice yet again.

Since it looks like I’m living in a weather-sealed home again, I’m even starting to like the rain the way I used to. The sound is cosy. I’m sitting here with my jasmine tea, and the only sounds are the rain, the fabric of my hoodie moving over the table and the laptop keys. From below I can hear Hass watching something, but that just adds to it.