“Having moved over a dozen times during my childhood, I had to find things to love about each place — to make it feel like mine; to make it feel like something I connected to and to make it feel like home. And so I did, finding a bit of magic in things large and small in all the new places I’d lived. I learned to think of moving as a grand adventure, where I got to play a “part” as the perpetually new kid in a new school, new street, new house. I was, in short, always reinventing myself. What may have started out of necessity became a habit and then turned into a passion.
“I don’t tend to talk about myself much. I grew up in a small, blue collar town and spent my early years dreaming of getting away from it, dreaming of gaining some small measure of success, enough to have a house that I owned and liked, one I could see myself raising a family in, and a job I didn’t hate.