Playing On Railroad Tracks: A Memoir

She could hear her dad’s words. “If you’re so bored, why don’t you just go play on the railroad tracks.” Going back home is never easy especially when you’re making the trip because a parent is ill. And so the journey begins for this daughter who has packed up everything she owns, except her two young daughters and her sanity, to race back to Indiana. Her mission. To rescue her parents. The problem. They didn’t ask her to come and they have no desire to be rescued. With a plan as flawed as the forty-year-old, green shag carpeting in her parents’ living room, every step Annie takes brings back a childhood memory. Making mud pies, chasing fireflies, Sunday trips with Dad to the bootlegger, and the explosive father/daughter relationship that promises to reignite at any moment. Coming face to face with the brevity of human life, and the value of a good sense of humor, proves to this stubborn daughter that the character defects we see in others are the very ones we own ourselves, and that trying to redecorate the past is, in her dad’s words – ‘like pissing in the wind.’

In her debut work, Lee Ann Ropes, regales the reader with her experience in the travel industry, the recovery community, and as a member of a calamitous and hysterically funny and unorthodox midwestern family. An avid photographer and animal lover, Lee Ann calls south Florida her home.