Sweet Memories

Hello! Arlene James here. At last. 

Technical difficulties have prevented me from gaining access to the blog for some time. I’m happy to have finally gotten past that. I hope. My thanks to Val Hansen for handling our scheduled post on her own last month. Val isn't just a sweetheart, she's a constant chuckle.

It’s been a very busy season for me, so busy that I can hardly believe the first book of my new series, THREE BROTHERS RANCH, is about to debut. Having grown up on a ranch outside of a small town in Oklahoma, these books are rife with memories for me.

Every day I walk past my late father’s sweat-stained straw cowboy hat, battered work boots, lariat, and spurs, all of which decorate my fireplace and are among my most prized possessions. I never so much as glance at those things without remembering the horses, the cattle, the corrals, the fences, the old tumble-down barn… I think of Dad roping out of the back of a rattletrap pickup truck driven across the pasture by a ten-year-old. I see him sowing lovegrass to improve grazing, hiring teenagers to help with the hay harvest, training horses, loading animals into trailers for transport. How many times did I climb a corral fence to help tend a cantankerous cow or horse? How many fences did I help mend? How many cattle auctions have I attended? Too many to count! And each one now precious to me. It was a grand life.

The cattle-raising industry has changed since the days of my youth. It’s a highly technological enterprise now. And still a grand life. It takes a savvy, hardworking, independent and self-driven, business person with a great love for the land, the outdoors, nature, and animals. Most ranchers work other jobs, too, but they take with them into those other professions the qualities that make them the bedrock of the American persona. I couldn’t be more proud to come out of that tradition or to write about it.

I hope you enjoy THE RANCHER’S ANSWERED PRAYER, which is available in retail from mid-September.

Three brothers see the hand of God in action when they inherit the ranch where so much of their youth was spent. With tragedy overwhelming their lives in Houston, the inheritance comes at the perfect time, but the transition is not without difficulty. For the Christian, however, difficulty never comes without a purpose, and that purpose is never revealed without faith. But how tough is it to hold onto faith when the will is not as expected, the cattle are all gone, and the tumbledown house you need to live in actually belongs to someone else?

To order                                Amazon

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