The Horse (Blogophilia 52.16)

Recently, I was looking at a horse trainer’s Facebook page where all the King’s horses were being put through their paces. It got me thinking about something that happened when I was about six or seven years old. We lived in a subdivision and beyond our street were mostly small horse farms, with a few cows interspersed here and there. There was a creek and an abandoned rock quarry. In other words, lots of places for a kid to get lost in and have adventures. One morning during the Spring, my mother was cleaning up the kitchen after everyone had left the house. Given there were four kids and a husband, this was not a small task. I was home sick from school, so she had me to deal with, too. She was also seriously hungover, but that seemed to make the time go faster for her. She was finishing up the sink when the phone rings. With a cuss, she snarches the receiver off the wall. It was the next door neighbor, Mrs. Rowan. "Teeny!” My mom had always been call...