Tracking Happiness: Chapter 5

This is CHAPTER 5 in our series offering gossip, novel backstory, and personal confessions about TRACKING HAPPINESS: A SOUTHERN CHICKEN ADVENTURE. We’re working our way through a novel here. If you’re just now discovering us, you can jump in now or go back to the first entry and catch up. If you jump in now, I can’t promise you it won’t be confusing, but it might be interesting too.

Ok. Last we left off: Lucinda is in the dining car with Erick and the Bruised Magnolia, a new train friend. Lucinda has drifted into a pensive mood. She’s reminiscing about home and wondering if she needs to go back to Edison and make sure her mama is doing okay in the face of an ever-growing scandal.

This, Chapter 5, contains a description of homemade fig preserves. You might need to know the most salient fact about my Jackson, Mississippi, Morris family is we own the officially-certified, State Champion Fig Tree of Mississippi. That means it’s the largest fig tree in the state. This tree, at its high-point in life, was 50 feet across, 20 feet deep, and 15-20 feet tall. My sister nominated the tree; the Mississippi Forestry Commission certified it; we have bragging rights. If you, too, have a HUGE tree, you might want to check into this program. Then you’ll have bragging rights.

Chapter 5 ends on a serious note. Most of my writings are humorous, but they always deal with something that’s kind of hard. Sometimes really hard. Like your daddy dying. Lucinda Mae’s father died almost two years prior to the start of our story. If you read—or listen to—much of my work, you’ll begin to notice a pattern: the father is often dead. Now, you could conclude from this that I don’t like fathers, and I’m constantly killing them off, but that would be incorrect. My own dad died when I was three. A train hit his car. Yep, I’ve written a novel where our heroine is riding across country on what was, in fact, the instrument of my father’s death. Maybe later I’ll tell you about my history with trains, but all you need to know for now is that, though I had the best stepfather a girl could ask for, grief is a topic I wrestle with. It’s a topic Lucinda wrestles with. Let’s hope, before the end of our story, she’s wrestled it to the ground and won. 

Okay, I think that’s enough preliminary information. 

HELPFUL TRAIN HINT: When riding the train, never take off your shoes. The area between train cars where coupling occurs (the train kind, not the human kind) does not totally meet. It has a crack. Your toes can get caught in the crack—right, this is a terrible situation. If one person hears this Helpful Train Hint and forgoes padding around barefoot on the train, it will be worth it. Wear. Your. Shoes.