08/26/2026
I’ve been spending a lot of time back home in Texas lately.
I came home to be at my mom’s bedside as she passed from this Earth, to be with friends and family as we processed the grief, and wound up reconnecting with a life I left behind 20 years ago.
Since then, life has taken me from the Marines to Chicago (with stops in California, Washington State, and St. Louis), through two college degrees and a career in Strategy Consulting, and eventually to becoming a husband and father of two. I always imagined I’d return to Texas someday, but momentum is a hell of a thing. Life has a way of carrying you forward without necessarily bringing you back to where you started.
Photography has become one of the ways I connect with places that mean something to me. So on my latest trip home, I brought my camera and revisited a few places that helped shape who I am.
1. Houston — Eleanor Tinsley Park
I used to run here and at Memorial Park while attending the University of Houston and later while training for Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. The skyline has changed. So have I. But the view still feels like home.
2. Galveston — Pleasure Pier
Growing up near Houston meant Galveston was always close by. We came here as kids to play in the surf, dodge jellyfish and seaweed, hunt for seashells, and search for the ultimate treasure: an unbroken sand dollar.
3. Bermuda Beach — Galveston
For a year when I was six or seven, my family lived in a beach house here. More than 30 years and countless storms later, I drove back and was amazed to find the house still standing.
I walked down to my old beach and saw this boy casting his line into the Gulf. He wasn’t much older than I was when I lived there, fishing the same water where I had done the same thing decades earlier.
For a moment, 30+ years didn’t seem like such a long time.
The house is still there. The Gulf is still rolling onto the same beach. And kids are still standing at the water’s edge, casting their lines into it.
That was good to see.
Sometimes going home reminds you how much has changed.
And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it reminds you how much hasn’t.
