I was born at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. My father served in the military, so some of my earliest memories aren’t tied to one hometown. They’re scattered across different places.
Our family lived overseas in Italy and Germany, and I attended school in Germany before we eventually returned to the United States.
My parents divorced while my father was stationed at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. After that, life changed considerably. My sister and I moved with our mother, first to Alabama and eventually to Newton, Mississippi, where we lived with our grandparents.
From Mississippi, life eventually took me to Franklin, Tennessee. And in many ways, that’s where the next chapter of my story really begins.
There were difficult parts of those early years that belong more to my family than to the internet. What matters to this story is that my childhood involved a lot of change.
Different countries. Different states. Different homes. Different definitions of family.
Maybe that’s part of the reason I’ve spent so much of my adult life trying to build things that last: a marriage, a family, teams, friendships, faith, and places where people know they belong.
I didn’t have language for any of that as a kid.
I was just trying to figure out where home was.
Bill Cole