Paint a different color on your front door
And tomorrow we may still be there

When I was younger, I believed that where you live is important as how you live. For me, the two were related. One was going to be happier in some places than in others, I reasoned, so it was important to choose carefully.

This was partly a reaction to what I saw my journalism school colleagues doing after college. Many took the first bus to wherever they could get a job, to terrible-sounding cities in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t want to do this, because I wanted to choose where I lived. So I resisted, or maybe never heard, whatever call they were hearing.

I was lucky; I got to stay in the town of my choice. But what I didn’t realize was that it would be the first in a long series of choices. Looking back at the places I’ve lived, the process of making the choices interests me now—as well as the expectations, the hopes, and the realities I inevitably had to live with.

In writing this series I’ve looked back at the places I’ve lived—favorite things, favorite memories, how I got there, why I left. And, since one choice inevitably led to another, I’ve tried to understand, in each case, what happened after.

The stories start when I was in college; they don’t include the house where I grew up. The reasons why I came to that house and left it were decisions made by other people; they didn’t have anything to do with me. That’s not to say there aren’t any stories from those 18 years, but they don’t fit within the scheme of this narrative; they’re stories for another time.