Meet Keith

        I was born and grew up in Hueytown, Alabama, which is a suburb southwest of Birmingham. I have a brother 7 years older than me named David and an identical twin named Paul, who is a whole 2 minutes older than me.

        I had a very happy childhood. I played a lot outside including all kinds of sports and games with the other kids in the neighborhood. As a family we went on a lot of camping trips, and about every other summer we would take off on a cross country road trip to some exotic location like Colorado or Wyoming having loads of fun camping out along the way and making memories that I will treasure for the rest of my life.

        As I got in my teenage years we began to spend a lot of time at a very rustic cabin we owned on the banks of a river. We would spend parts of weekends working on the cabin and the rest of the time hanging out on the water. Those were wonderful times spending lazy summer days with my family and my beloved pet chihuahua Chico.

        After high school I completed a B.A. in History with a minor in English at the University of Montevallo, a small liberal arts college in central Alabama. Books are a major part of my life to this day, and I really can thank my parents for that. My Dad was always reading and my Mom really began to expose me to literature like Faulkner and Dreiser as I got older because she was reading these authors. Once I picked up those books I never looked back. I went on to become a very enthusiastic English minor. I remember in a class on Dickens we were assigned Bleak House a 900+ page novel, and I sailed through it in a week. I literally could not put it down I was so entranced with the language, time and place that Dickens took me to. I graduated from Montevallo a very well-rounded person even if I did not exactly have a job waiting for me the day after graduation.

        A few months after I graduated, I moved to Miami, Florida with my brother Paul where he found a job in accounting and I worked some odd jobs but mainly passed the days in the local library reading huge Russian novels. I had been there for about six months when my Mom called to tell us the news that my 95 year old grandmother, who I was very close to, fell ill and was in the hospital. I left the next day and spent the next three weeks at the hospital with her until she passed away.

        It was after her death and talking with my parents that I decided to take a firm direction in my life instead of floating around. I went to Auburn a couple of weeks later to look into graduate programs when a pamphlet for the horticulture department caught my eye. It said their graduates have a 100% job placement. Well, I always liked being outside and I always liked gardening. Even when I was at Montevallo, I read books on plants so it made sense to me. Just like that, I enrolled at Auburn as a horticulture major. I really enjoyed my classes and professors and excelled academically never making less than an 'A' in my two years there. I really love horticulture for artistic reasons because a place looks more beautiful after we have been there, which I find so rewarding.

        After Auburn, I accepted a job in May of 2003 with Brickman in Macon. I spent most of my time with Brickman taking care of the grounds at Mercer, so if any of you all were on campus during that time chances are you walked right past me. After two and a half years with Brickman I really grew tired of the cold calculating and corporate manner that was their culture, so I left. I also felt like I had been spinning my wheels without really going anywhere for two and half years so I decided to make a change with my life.

        A month later, I stepped off a plane by myself in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city of 13 million, without knowing a single person. I enrolled into a spanish language immersion school and moved in with an Argentine family in a barrio of Buenos Aires for a month. I really began to settle in and open up to people who had been strangers but who were fast becoming friends, which was a rewarding experience for me. I left Buenos Aires for a five month odyssey that included second class buses, ferries, trains, taxis, lots of walking, youth hostels, very very low budget hotels, guest houses, and the countries of Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Bolivia. I really came back a different person and appreciative that in the United States, even if you are poor you can dream and achieve a better life, which many people of the world do not have the opportunity to do.

        I arrived back in six months and found a job within a week in Birmingham. After I worked there for about nine months, I got a call from a small company in Byron that wanted me come join the team. The owners knew me from Brickman and really liked and respected my work, and I felt the same way about them so I returned to central Georgia in March of 2007 and it really has been a perfect fit. I get to do a lot of landscape design which satisfies my artistic cravings, and it really feels like working with family.

        I have always felt like I have had a wonderful life, but deep down I always felt like there was something missing to make it complete. That missing piece more than likely had crossed my path without me realizing until we finally intersected, stopped and found each other. The missing piece, Jennifer, has truly made my life fulfilling, and I really feel like I hit the jackpot with her in my life. I look forward to completing the future chapters of my life with Jennifer by my side.