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Here’s an excerpt from Slipping: Slipping excerpt

Here are the first two chapters of Little Blog on the Prairie:

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At first, it felt like a normal family vacation. There was the latenight packing, the airport breakfast, the fighting with my little brother over the window seat, the chewing of three pieces of gum as the plane took off so my ears wouldn’t pop.

But there was nothing normal about the camp director, Ron, who met us at the baggage claim area in Laramie, Wyoming. Tall and gaunt, he was wearing a black felt hat, a roughly woven shirt, and boots he could have borrowed from his cousin Frankenstein. Back in sixth grade, I had to do a report on the Amish, and Ron looked like one of them, except the Amish usually drive buggies and make pretzels, and Ron was holding a sign that said “The Welsh Family”— that’s us— as if he were some kind of celebrity limo driver gone wrong.

Two hours and one bumpy ride down an endless dirt road later, we met Ron’s wife, Betsy. As we were tumbling out of the van she was standing on the porch of their house, and we could see right away that she was no Frankenstein. Instead, she looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Or woman. Or what ever. Th ere were blond curls poking out from beneath her bonnet, her cheeks were red like they’d been scrubbed, and in her long, light brown dress and fl owery apron, she could have been one of those women who work at the historic places you go to on field trips— you know, they show you all about spinning wool or baking bread, but you can see that underneath their dresses they’re wearing sneakers and sweatpants.

“Welcome,” Betsy called down from the porch, “to the year 1890.”

And that’s when it hit me. Those women who work at the historic field trip places? Betsy wasn’t one of them. These weren’t costumes she and Ron were wearing. Their clothes were for real. And in about five minutes, all of this would be real for me too.

My mom and I had the biggest fight of my life when she told me we’d be going to frontier family history camp— this place in the middle of nowhere, where you live with your family in a one room cabin, you work all the time doing house work and farm stuff, girls have to wear dresses, there’s nothing for kids to do, and anything you’d want to bring is not allowed— no iPods, no phones, no computers, no sports, no friends, no games. We’d be pretending to live in the time before even Monopoly was invented, not that I like that game.