just a small part of me.

I don't remember how my parents told my brothers and I that we were moving to California. I just remember that my father would disappear for a few months at a time and I never knew why. That year, he missed Halloween and he came home only on the day of Thanksgiving. I don't know what I thought had happened to him. But one day he just returned and we packed up all of our things.

There were rocks in the backyard that I had to say good-bye to. Even though I don't remember much of our beautiful home in Altanta, I remember on summer afternoons, my brother and I would lift up this rock and play with the ants living beneath it. I also remember having to say good-bye to the creek that ran through our backyard and the playground my dad had built from scratch and the deck he and my brother constructed one summer and my friend Sharon, who lived a few blocks away. I remember hugging her for the last time, although at the time it felt like I was taking a trip to Disneyworld and would be back the next weekend.

On the drive to California, my dad pointed out the mountains and the statelines and the animals along the freeway. I watched as the world changed from flat and tree-filled Georgia to Louisiana to Texas to Arizona.

"Look, Carrie, you couldn't see this in Altanta," my dad said to me, with his usual enthusiasm.

"It looks like Georgia," I said.

We stopped at the Grand Canyon on our way to my aunt's house in Phoenix.

"It looks like Georgia," I said.

We stayed in Phoenix for Christmas. The air was dry and hot, not cold and moist as the air in Altanta had been. Not on the verge of snow. We took hikes up mountain sides and saw geckos and snakes and scorpions.

"It looks like Georgia," I would say.

When we finally reached our new home in Hillsborough, California, it was New Year's Eve and my dad's birthday. The sun was shining and we drove the car up a steep driveway into a two-car garage. My mom hated that driveway; the 90-degree angle always scared her.

We pulled a few boxes out of the trunk of the car and my dad showed us our new rooms.

"What do you think?" he asked me when he took me to my new bedroom. There was a cockroach lying on its back next to the closet.

"It looks like Georgia. Let's go home."

I'm not sure when I finally admitted to myself that I was wrong. Maybe I knew all along. I've never been good at being defeated.