Read the beginning of Chapter 2, "The Good Land" from My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas by Tracy Seeley:

"I shiver in the backseat in the corner against the door. I hold my cheek against the cold metal until it hurts. I hold myself very still. I am five, and we are moving away. My father drives. My mother sits next to him and says nothing. I will not look at them. Instead, I stare out the window and hear the car tires slub, slub, slub on the
red brick streets. My chest hurts. The narrow dark windows of my school slide by—window, window, window, window. I can’t see in. But I know that Mrs. Little’s kindergarten is going on without me. The children are using quiet voices, cutting paper and coloring, reading and writing in the big yellow workbooks with smooth, dry pages and an elephant on the front. They are listening to stories and taking a quiet nap on cool mats with the lights turned out. I had waited a whole year for school, while my older sister fell in love with Mrs. Little and sat in a circle on the braided rug and came home singing new songs. All of that has been mine for less than half a year. I can hardly breathe. My throat aches. I do not speak or cry. We turn a corner and the brick streets end. We are moving away.

Goodland, Kansas, was not the first place we left, but it is the first I remember leaving. It is my earliest memory of any kind; but no, that’s not quite it. I remember losing my fi rst tooth at the Dairy Queen and going to the Halloween party at the one-room school where my mother taught just down the road. But this memory of leaving comes back glistening and whole, an image in amber. A single moment trapped in the sap of a seeping wound until it has hardened in place, unchanging and burnished like a jewel.

Forty years later I was headed back.

The day before, in Pueblo, Colorado, I’d sat in the car in a parking lot, feeling worn out and confused. I’d spent days tracking down the first seven of my thirteen addresses in four different Colorado towns. I’d been to two houses in Grand Junction, two in Montrose, one in Colorado Springs, and two in Pueblo. By the end, the houses had all begun to look the same, all clapboard ranches in what had nearly always been new suburbs. Their numbing sameness seemed the only story I could put together, my parents riding the midcentury wave of upward American mobility. That story I could understand. But the profusion of houses puzzled me. Why so many in so few years? When did we live where? I tried to pencil out a timeline. I knew I’d been born in Montrose, and then we’d moved to Grand Junction. But when? And left Grand Junction when?

I pulled out my mother’s address list and, for the first time, really studied the few moving dates she had written down. They were all from our Colorado years, as if to say, “pay close attention here.” Between my birth and age three, we’d moved three times. Then my sister Shannon was born. When she was three months old, we left Grand Junction for Colorado Springs, where we stayed for two months. Whoa. Moving with a three-month-old, staying for two months, then packing up again, this time for Pueblo? There we spent seven months in each of two houses and then decamped for Kansas. Altogether, that meant seven moves in four years, the last three moves in the space of eight months, the last four in eighteen.

I felt stunned. I didn’t know what to feel. Of course I’d known about the thirteen addresses. But what had it been like, not just to live in so many places, but to move so often, to hear, just after the last box had been unpacked, or not even, that another job had failed, that another, better chance lay just over the next hill. My mother must have done nothing but pack, unpack, change diapers, tend children, house hunt, clean, launder, and feel what? Worry? Resentment? Anger? Fear?" 

To read a longer excerpt or to pre-order My Ruby Slippers, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/My-Ruby-Slippers,674753.aspx.