by Roxanne Rustand
First of all, my newest release, DEADLY VENDETTA, is up for pre-order at a bargain price! A quick blurb:
DEA Agent Zach’s troubled sister disappeared years ago. Now she’s at his door, saying her little girl witnessed a murder, and says the killers are after them both. She begs him to keep Katie safe…and then she disappears. For good. After a bomb explodes in his home he knows—he needs to take Katie to a safe place far away until he can figure out who is involved. And he knows the perfect place—a tiny, isolated ranching town in Colorado, where every stranger is noticed. And far too memories lay waiting…
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It’s been hot here. Hot and humid and occasionally stormy. I am really looking forward to October! The weather got me thinking about those long, endless days of summer during childhood. when the span of time between the last day of school and September seemed too long to even imagine. Now, I seem to be in an alternate universe, where Memorial Day and Labor Day are just a breath apart.
I was six when I got my first horse, an elderly mare likely in her mid-twenties or even older. She had trouble with dry, cracked hooves, and the farrier recommended an economical alternative to hoof dressing: plain ole lard, slathered on the hooves right up along the coronary band (where the pastern stops and the hoof begins. My dad brought home one gallon pail of it after another.
Spending time in that little stable (really, a garage-type addition onto our garage, with one box stall and a tack area) was like playing house when I was little. I loved to pound nails for hanging things to keep everything “just so.” One summer, while I was straightening up the small cabinet for brushes and horse salves, I reached up for a forgotten container well above my head.
I will never forget that hot summer day—or the way that gallon pail slowly…slowly…slowly rotated within my grasp as I teetered precariously on an upturned bucket. My surprise when I realized the lid was gone…
And a millisecond later, the horror of feeling melted, rancid lard dump over my head. Complete, mind you, with an ample supply of flies that had drowned in it over the past year. The slime in Ghostbusters has nothing on melted lard.
My clothes had to be thrown away. Shampoo couldn’t cut through that thick grease. My mom tried vinegar, and lemon juice, and more shampoo…though my long blonde hair hung in dark, limp strands for a good week. Maybe it didn’t look quite as bad as the Jell-O incident, but that’s another story…
Do you have a particular memory from childhood when something perfect and wonderful happened…or completely went south?
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Wishing you a wonderful summer,
Roxanne Rustand
Oh my gosh, that sounds horrible… I remember once as a kid getting lice and my mom used kerosene on my head… the smell was horrible… even after washing it out the smell stayed in my nose.
can’t think of anything