By Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:
‘MY RUBY SLIPPERS’
“I grew up in a family that was extremely mobile,” Tracy Seeley said. “We were a very unsettled family. And my parents weren’t from Kansas. I did most of my growing up in Wichita, but we never felt, really, as if we were home.”
Seeley lived in seven locations in Colorado before the age of 4, and six residences in Kansas before she turned 9. At that point, in the mid-‘60s, her dysfunctional family settled in Wichita.
Her father chased elusive dreams which made for a chaotic childhood for Seeley and her two sisters. When she headed to Texas for college at 17, she didn’t look back.
Besides wanting to leave the family craziness behind, she also wanted to get rid of the stigma of being from this state. “… I worked at shucking Kansas off like the skin of a cicada,” she wrote in her new book, “My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas.”
Seeley went to graduate school, taught at Yale, then landed in California in 1993. She now teaches English at the University of San Francisco.
Although at one time she “didn’t want the taint of Kansas to touch (her),” a few decades later, several life-changing events caused Seeley to think about revisiting this state. First, her divorced parents died within two weeks of each other. A few years later, she learned she had cancer. The day after the diagnosis, the man in her life left her for someone else.
Beginning in 2002, she made five trips to Kansas, partly to fill in the blanks in her family’s story, and partly to see if there was a way to connect to the state where she had spent her childhood.
I listened to Seeley speak at the Lindsborg Public Library on July 20. Because this was Lindsborg, the audience was treated to Swedish pancakes with lingonberry jam.
Each time the family moved when Seeley was a child, her mother wrote the new address in her baby book. When Seeley flew into Denver for that first return trip in 2002, she brought with her that list of 13 addresses. She tracked down the Colorado houses; some were still there, some not. Then she looked for her old houses in Goodland, Hays and Wichita.
Seeley spoke of two kinds of people – those who have a really strong sense of a home place and those who long for that feeling of home.
She wrote, “No wonder Kansas had never felt like home. The place wasn’t ours by birthright or desire or attachment to the soil, but by accident. … In Kansas we were out of place. Unrooted and uneasy.”
On subsequent trips, Seeley explored other parts of the state. Learning about the history here made her feel more connected to Kansas. In her book, she writes about the Osage and the Pawnee Indians, Nicodemus, Lindsborg, and folks like John Brown and William Inge.
When asked about her favorite place in Kansas, she said, “The Flint Hills feels like home and I think it’s because I spent a lot of summers there in Girl Scout camp, and that’s where I had the most experience outdoors and being on the soil and being out in the weather. I love it there and absolutely feel at home.”
On one trip, she met Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina. Because of his connections, she spent 10 days living in a two-story house in Matfield Green in 2004. There, she wrote, listened to thunderstorms move over the house, walked in the hills and met a few local residents.
She wrote, “Now atop the ridge outside Matfield Green, I knew that I, a child of Kansas, had imprinted on this land, been shaped by its subtleties and sweep, so that in coming here, I found myself at home. A sweet familiar breeze cooled my arms and set the grasses waving. It stirred the cottonwoods by a pasture gate, rattling their soft leaves like fine sand spilling on a hardwood floor. Like small rain.”
During her time in Chase County, Seeley daydreamed about moving back to Kansas. She hasn’t, but she has made her peace with this state. And she describes her book as “a loving reconciliation with the place I came from – Kansas.”
“My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas,” published by Bison Books, is available at Town Crier Book Store.
Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh
For more information, check out TracySeeley.com.
Swedish pancake with lingonberry sauce.
That’s a great story, thanks for sharing it.
When I was 14, I counted the number of houses I had lived in and came up with 21. I’ve lived in 15 houses in the 26 years since then. Since 1994 we have only lived in 2 houses, the one my youngest two children were born in (11 years) and this one (6 years). I love living in our dream home in a small town and finally feeling that we are beginning to grow roots here, but I long to travel. I think my childhood gave me a love for the road. There’s familiarity and excitement there, even in places I’ve never traveled before.
Roots are good. I have known many military children who have attended ESU. They also have benefited for the multi-home (often around the world) experience. This is a ball in the air for me. I do think that loss of connection with nuclear family is a negative. I say this from my personal perspective.