=================================================
Who would have thought it?! Our pigs actually enjoyed living outdoors and even seemed to prefer the old barn and two acre field to the confines of life in our living room.
As they settled nicely into their outdoor space, where they relished having old barn boards to rip from the walls, grape vines to pull from the arbors and grassy acres to convert into mud holes, I went about preparing the place to make it a suitable winter residence.
Thinking that they would be far more comfortable in a cozy little hut, all cuddled up in a piggy pile, I built them a piggy house, such as my building skills allowed.
My building skills, as you may have come to realize by this point, leave much to be desired.
It, thus, came as no surprise when I couldn’t quite figure out how to determine the measurements necessary to construct an “A Frame” roof for their building, which was little more than a really large dog house.
I had been altogether unsure whether to utilize the Pythagorean Theorem, some concept of the Pi equation, the theory of relativity, the big bang theory or the good ol’ A2+B2=C2 formula so I simply took a poorly educated guess and, not surprisingly, fell short on my calculations.
When the roof was placed on top, in spite of what I had thought were extremely accurate guess angle measurements, not only was there not an eave overhang but the entire roof stopped short of the edge by 2” on either side.
Ever resourceful, I draped plastic sheeting over the top, stapled it down tightly then added a heat lamp inside. Next came a nice bed of fresh straw and blankets galore from the Goodwill store for the gals to sleep beneath.
The next task, the difficulty of which I underestimated even more than I had the roof dimensions, was to convince the pigs to move in.
Pigs, not unlike pigheaded men, do not ever, under any circumstances, like to be told what to do. They will, even to their own detriment, oppose a much better idea rather than submit to another's recommendation.
Amidst the loudest, most protesting screams and most menacing grunts that they could muster, I marched, herded and corralled the trio over to their new house and then attempted to shove them, one by one, inside where I threw the covers over them so that they could discover what a wonderful place I had made them.
As one was pushed in and covered, though, another ran out. The process repeated until I was exhausted and frustrated and exhausted at being frustrated by those ding dang pigs!
After far more effort than one should ever expend trying to stuff pigs in a blanket, I gave up and, once again, conceded failure.
At no time in the process did the pig screams ever stop or even so much as pause. I was sweaty, dirty, the straw and blankets were scattered about and the truth of the old saying, "Never wrestle with a pig. You'll both end up muddy but the pig will enjoy it," rang true.
Before my hog house construction even began, the pigs, one and all, had opted for an unsuitable old horse stall, which was completely barren of a door to shut out the winter wind, as their new home and they were not about to be evicted and relocated by the likes of me.
The only time they stepped hoof into my little pig house again was to drag out the blankets which they carried to the horse house that they now called home.
Utilizing the strategy which I harshly, if privately, have judged many a bratty child’s parents for using, I decided it was far easier to just give in to the pigs’ demands and allow them to do whatever it was they wished to do.
In my enablement of hoggish behavior, I measured the horse stall opening and headed to the local hardware store to buy the building materials necessary to construct a door. It was the least I could do.
Our local hardware store was staffed by retired farmers, contractors and tradesmen who welcomed nothing more than a project that was to be completed by a novice like me.
Unlike the big chain hardware stores that are often staffed by workers who know no more about building than do I (surprisingly, such persons do exist!), the fellas at the small town store, when I described my needs to them, would gather together in a huddle, discuss the situation, sketch diagrams, reach a consensus, gather the supplies for me and describe to me exactly what needed to be done.
The result was that I returned home with all the necessary supplies but the “know how” on my part remained sorely lacking. Those detailed directions provided me, which included sophisticated construction terminology such as “miter cuts”, “socket sets” and ”hanging plumb” were so foreign to me that, had the instructions been spoken in Macedonian or, worse, provided in IKEA stick figure fashion, I would have been no less prepared to complete the task.
Fortunately, the moment I walked into the hardware store for the pig stall project, I happened upon a clearance aisle where I found, in exactly the width I needed, a beautiful set of 15 panel French Doors!
Being that they were cheap and already built, I quickly bought them, loaded them into the back of my new truck which, even if forbidden by the Pot Bellied Pig Rescue Society of Ohio for swine transport, was quite the handy vehicle now that I was a "farmer".
With the sting of the Pig House failure so fresh, though, I opted to call a local handy man to install the door.
The handy man arrived, looked at the doors, looked around as he took in the realization that it was a barnyard in which he was being tasked with installing French doors, looked at the stall, looked at the pigs, looked absolutely bewildered at me as I explained that the doors were, indeed, for the hog house, scratched his head, rubbed his chin and, without a word, got to work.
In less time than it would have taken me to find my hammer, which was more likely to have been in a nest box in the hen house than in the toolbox, he had the door completely installed.
He took a picture, as I’m sure he was certain that his buddies at “The Handy Man Bar and Grill” would never believe what he had been tasked to do, wished me luck and left me to marvel at what we dubbed “The Pig Parlor”.
We hung some curtains and gave the pigs our Sealy posturpedic mattress which was unusable in the house as it, like so much of our furniture, would not fit around the corner of the narrow, fully enclosed farm house staircase and, therefore, could not be moved upstairs. We then made up their bed with fitted sheets added the blankets and rehung the heat lamp with an infrared night light so as not to disturb the piggy slumber.
The Pig Parlor was, in a word, spectacular!
They loved their place and for the first time in our coexistence both the pigs and we were happy with the arrangements.
Things went uneventfully for nearly a week after which Jo-Ann came rushing into the house to tell me that Misty, the nicest of the pigs (which is to say the least likely to go into a teeth chomping, hair raised, full attack mode at the drop of a hat), had lost her eye.
“Lost her eye?!” I exclaimed and went running to the field to find Misty eating grass and worms as if nothing at all was wrong. As I knelt to look at her, though, it was very obvious that she had only a fold of fat covering the sunken socket where her eyeball should have been.
Not knowing what else to do, I quickly called Little Bit’s Mom, our Pig Mentor, and she came over moments later with a full veterinary kit which, evidently, real farmers keep right on their nightstand for just such an eye loss emergency.
After a thorough examination by Little Bit's Mom and determining that the pig was, indeed, sans an eyeball, she decided that the best course of action was to flip Misty onto her haunches and hold her tightly in a sitting position while she applied antibiotic ointment to the eyeball socket.
Why the pig could not be held while on all fours to this day remains a mystery to me. Since it was I who would obviously be doing the pig flipping and hog holding, I was less than enthusiastic with the plan but, as Little Bit’s Mom was the pig expert, a flip onto her haunches (Misty's, not Little Bit's Mom) it would be.
Completely nonplussed at the attention which she was suddenly being shown and sensing that we were not taking the situation as well as was she, Misty took off like a greased pig at a country fair.
I chased her through weeds and mud and, at last, into a corner of the field. Her screaming at being pursued reached a level more intense than I had ever heard previously though I had been hearing intense pig screams, over one matter or another, on a regular basis for weeks.
The other sows quickly came running over, not so much because they gave a hoot about Misty, but because a pig, in my experience, never misses an opportunity to join into a crescendo of hog hollerin’.
Amidst the deafening raucous from the trio, I leaned over Misty, wrapped my arms around her sizeable girth, lifted and simultaneously fell backwards, pulling her with me as I toppled.
I landed in the weeds with quite a thud and with a pig in my lap.
At that moment, in quite an unfortunate, uncomfortable and vulnerable position for us both, Misty threw her head back, let out the loudest scream in her existence and, as she bellowed loudly enough for anyone within a country mile to hear, both of her eye sockets popped fully open, revealing not one but two eye balls staring wildly but in exactly the spots where the two eyes ought to be.
Standing there with a tube of ointment in hand, Little Bit’s Mom seemed almost disappointed at the loss of opportunity to put her pig doctoring skills to use while Jo-Ann joined in with squeals of her own, while clapping her hands and jumping for joy, “Her eye is back! Her eye is back!”
Jo-Ann, rejoicing at the turn of events, and Little Bit’s Mom, pouting at the anticlimactic treatment opportunity but insisting that I continue to hold the hog while she went to get hoof trimmers so that she could at least get her hands dirty doing something farmer related, headed from the field and back to the barn.
As I sat, with the pig in my lap, enduring the continued hog howls, a truck slowed on the road and the man behind the wheel glared at me.
It was then that I, completely mortified, realized what that man was seeing; I was sitting alone in a field, in knee high grass with a screaming sow squirming on my lap, my arms wrapped tightly around her.
I could simply shake my head “no” as he slowly drove away.
If there is a bright side, at least it wasn't a sheep which I was holding? Those wouldn't come until the following Spring.
No comments:
Post a Comment