From the age of 3 until I got married back in 1998, I lived in 17 different houses, mobile homes, college dorms or apartments.

Details on my living accommodations from birth until I was 3 are a little sketchy.

Me and two of my brothers spent a year at the Lena Pope Home in Fort Worth, which at the time was a home that focused on foster care and adoption services. Gary recently told me I was in a different part of the home and saw him and Randy only a couple of times that year.

I was eventually reunited with my brothers and my dad when I was 3, and through a series of events over the years I gained a second mom and all sorts of family that included a stepmom, step sisters and step brothers and half sisters and half brothers on paper but just mom, sisters and brothers in my heart.

One of the first things my dad taught me was the importance of family.

Addresses and dwellings can change, but if the people living under a roof love each other, it doesn’t matter if that roof covers a big, two-story brick house like the one we lived in for about a year or a small mobile home parked by a pond that was home to what must have been the biggest — and loudest — bullfrog in East Tennessee.

When I was single, the idea of owning a house honestly never crossed my mind. My work days lasted from 12 to 15 hours, and there was a lot of travel involved. All I needed to survive was a bed, a television for the rare occasions I was home long enough to watch a ballgame and enough fast food places nearby to keep me from starving — or worse — resorting to eating my own cooking.

I got married in 1998, and two years later Rachel and I decided we were both tired of living in apartments and rent houses. A memory popped up on my Facebook page this week reminding me we moved into our current house on April 28, 2000.

The house isn’t fancy.

It was built back in 1956, which makes it 10 years older than me, and we have some of the same problems. We both make cracking or popping noises at odd times, and over the past few years replacing or fixing stuff that breaks or wears out has become almost constant — roof, plumbing and floors for the house; and hip and heart (but thankfully, not the plumbing) for me.

Our house sits across the road from the football stadium where the local high school and college teams play and beside what used to be a busy city league baseball field. A block away is the coolest baseball stadium in the state — historic Driller Park.

I didn’t plan that part, but as a career sports writer, it’s almost like it was meant to be.

When we moved into the house, our neighbors beside us greeted us before we had even finished getting all of our stuff in the door. Mr. and Mrs. Matthews welcomed us to the neighborhood with cold sodas and a cake and informed us we were basically being adopted by them.

They weren’t joking, either.

Mr. Matthews instantly became someone I looked up to, and it didn’t matter how late I worked, Mrs. Matthews refused to go to sleep at night until the headlights from my truck shined through her bedroom window to let her know I was home.

Our son, Kyle, spent three months in Oklahoma working a few years back, but other than that he’s lived in the same house for all of his almost 23 years.

Eventually, he’ll leave the nest for good. I’ll probably need more work done on my heart when that happens, but I know he’ll take nothing but good memories with him.

Our almost famous dogs — Sarge and Bentley — and the cat that adopted us — Murphy — seem to love the little house

My wife?

Rachel never talked much about her “dream home” before we found the house we bought 24 years ago, and I think I finally figured out why.

The house is just a structure. It didn’t become a home until we started filling it with memories.