Road tar is not a substitute for nail polish

Somehow, the freezing Colorado weather has me missing my childhood summers growing up on the Chesapeake bay. Then, out of nowhere, pops this memory- which I had NOT missed.


There were five of us kids and we lived in a very rural area of Maryland. The back-country roads were mostly black tar and they would get so hot in the summer the road tar would get hot and bubbly. We decided it would be fun to "paint" our fingernails and toenails with the black tar. We scraped the soft tar up and smeared it on all our nails (5 kids x 20 fingers/toes = 100 tar-covered nails). But the time we walked home, the tar had cooled and hardened. My mom was appalled/shocked/angry to say the least. She would not let us into the house until got it off. So we sat outside for hours with the hose trying to scrape, scrub, and wash the tar off our nails. As a reminder, road tar, by design, is meant to last a VERY LONG time. I don't recall how long it took to get it off, or even if we got it all off that day, but it sticks in my mind as a painful lesson for my siblings and I. I have never done it since :)