Growing up during my early formative years in a United States Air Force 🇺🇸 family that traveled, I lived in at least five sibling homes in three different states and also overseas in France 🇫🇷 before I was 10 years old.
When my sibling family finally settled not far from my paternal hometown of the city of Olathe, in my maternal hometown of Paola, Kansas after my father’s military service, I was conditioned to moving and starting over.
Most military kids who have moved around and lived in different places are generally pretty resilient. The most resilient among them “grow where they are planted.”
Our own military service involved lots of moving too.
We’ve lived in our current city longer than we have lived anywhere including our paternal hometowns where we grew up with our respective sibling families.
We’ve adopted this community (and it’s adopted us) as our forever home.
But everywhere we have lived together has become our home where we “grew where we were planted.”
We have come to realize that the mindset of making a home and doing our best to serve our community wherever we are is one of the keys to our resilience.
The other is understanding the fact that “together” the two of us are always home.
Family. Life has taught us that our family is just the two of us and then expands to include our offspring, blood relatives, and our “life” family members.
In 2024 our family will celebrate our being a home and together for 45 years.
We both will also celebrate continuing to learn from our ancestral family trees despite being displaced from most of them individually by generations.
We’re validating our research as musicians and artists again by releasing the recording of our newest album inspired by family on the date of our anniversary too.
If you’re reading this and made it to the end, you are likely “family.” Thank you for growing with us.
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MUSINGS IN Cb: “She’s my family.”
PHOTO by Corinna Gray Photography (2023)
Christopher and Terri (Anderson) Burnett established their branch of The Burnett Family in March of 1979 in Copenhagen, Denmark. They are professional musicians, educators, and entrepreneurs based in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area.