Moving

Sometimes I don't like it when people ask me where I'm from because I don't have a simple answer.

I'm most recently from Florida, so sometimes that will suffice. That's where I went to high school and that's where my parents still live.

You must keep in mind, though, that I'm from the Florida panhandle. Northwest Florida. What we lovingly call the "Redneck Riviera". It's basically south Alabama on the beach.

More specifically, I'm from a smallish town called Niceville.

Yes, you read that right: Niceville. Home of the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival. (A mullet is in this case a bottom dwelling fish, by the way, not a hair style, though you'll see some of those at the Mullet Festival too.)

But this doesn't tell my entire story.

My parents are from Arkansas and Alabama, so each of those states are in my blood. I've always had family connections in both places, as well as in Georgia and Texas. When I was growing up we regularly made road trips between Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas for holidays and family vacations. My relatives' homes in those places, especially my grandparents' house in Arkansas, were the closest thing I knew to a constant home as a child.

I was born in Washington State, as was my sister. Not long after her birth, we moved to a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. We then moved to northern Saskatchewan, Canada. From there we went to Omaha, Nebraska, and from there back to Atlanta. We moved to Florida during Christmas break of my 7th grade year and have been there ever since.

No, my parents aren't in the military. My dad is a civil engineer (with a graduate degree in dirt, I might add) who worked on bridges, dams, and hydroelectric power plants. Once you build one of those things, you move on to the next one.

I went to college in Houston, with a year-long sojourn to Jerusalem, Israel. From Houston I moved to Chicago for graduate school and have been here ever since.

Moving so much helped me learn to adapt to new situations. It probably fostered in me a sense of always wanting to do new things. It taught me to make friends quickly, but to not get too close to them. It made me independent.

For better and for worse, moving made me who I am.