To market, to market to sell a fat pig
Home again, home again, jiggety-jigIt didn't precisely fit the day's planned activities, but the children and I recited the verse with exuberance as we gobbled down an early breakfast and prepared to help herd the hogs into the truck. They had a 9:00 appointment with the butcher.
My husband had arranged to borrow some stock racks and puttered up the road to get them as we cleared the breakfast dishes. Some twenty minutes later he returned with borrowed racks and a borrowed truck. The racks hadn't seemed to fit our truck, so our kindly neighbor had offered his entire rig. We rushed out to meet husband/dad as he backed up to the fence which was holding in a thousand pound of pork on the hoof.
I must interject here that while we are not innately ignorant people, we, having lived the greater portion of our lives in the suburbs of a large city, are learning-as-we-go in the process of our miniscule "farming" endeavors. There was a giant lesson in store for us this day.
The pigs had escaped from their pen for the umpty-dumpth time and were roaming our small acreage at will. First in the order of business was to get those porkers gathered into a fairly confined portion of the pasture near the gate. It was drizzling, and we were slipping through the muck and mud in our efforts to round them up. Once accomplished, we proceeded to assemble what seemed to be an adequate ramp into the truck and covered it with straw. Now, rush the pigs!
No go.
Well, if we would pull the truck out farther and block the sides, we could extend the ramp, lessen the incline, and we'd add a trail of corn for coaxing. When they came up the ramp, I would be on one side of the truck with a baseball bat and our son on the other with a board, and we would "encourage" them to stay in the truck while my husband disengaged the ramp and shut the tailgate. Good plan.
No go.
We worked from this angle for over an hour and discovered in the process that when rushed, the pigs preferred to scurry through a hole in the implement shed wall and into the viewing pen we'd constructed in that building. We summarily blocked the hole in the shed wall, yet they were no more inclined to "walk the plank" than before.
We took a break and reassessed the situation. If they were so fond of the implement shed, we would just have to tear-out a portion of the viewing pen fence so we could back the truck up to the hole in the side of the shed. They would think they were scurrying to safety, when, in fact, they would be scampering into the truck. It would require a lot of hard work and fast action, as we were bearing down on the butcher's appointment time, but it was our only recourse.
So I received instructions from my husband to shut the fence gate as he pulled the truck away and into the shed. One minor detail was omitted in this plan--a 300# ramp was resting against the side of the truck. As the truck moved moved away and I turned from closing the gate, I experienced excruciating pain in the back of my leg, which sent me straight to the ground. When the truck rolled away, that ramp had fallen against the back of my leg.
I was writhing on the ground as my daughter shouted, "Mom broke her leg! Mom broke her leg!" Well, I knew my leg wasn't broken. I wondered if there was any hide left on it, but I knew it wasn't broken. My daughter was to tell me later that a broken leg was the only thing she could think of which would make a mom cry. Now she knows tissue damage causing a four-inch by foot-long bruise can make a mom cry.
I recovered sufficiently to hobble into the shed and help with the dismantling of the fence around the viewing pen. We got the truck backed up to the existing hole in the side wall of the shed and discovered the hole wasn't tall enough to allow entrance into the truck bed.
At this juncture we lost our heads, as it were, and started discussing the possibility of shooting the pigs and dragging them into the truck. We decided this was an excellent proposition and called the butcher to see if it would make any difference if we brought the pigs in dead.
No go.
Back in the shed, we kicked and rammed at the hole in the wall until it was large enough to allow the pigs to enter. We positioned our ramps, straw, and corn-lure. I stood guard with my baseball bat and our daughter took the place of her younger brother, who by this time had found bigger and better things to do with his time.
Here we were met with a new problem. While the pigs had lost interest in entering the implement shed, the goats had become quite enthralled by the whole operation and were bound and determined to find out what was going on inside that hole. Instead of keeping pigs in the truck, we were using our weapons to keep goats out. "Here comes Mow!" Whack! "Oh no, now Abigail!" Whack!
At 9:25 I limped out of the shed and into the pasture and said, "Dear, I don't think we're going to get these pigs in the truck. I think you better call and cancel our appointment."
He did.
I mopped the mud from the kitchen floor, changed my filthy and torn clothes, and positioned myself in a chair directly across from my very discouraged husband. "Now look," says I, "The first warm day we can go put the fence back up. We can repair the hole in the shed. Maybe we'll even want to paint the shed this spring. We can gather all the boards when your back stops hurting and I can walk upright again. And perhaps we won't even plant a garden this year. Maybe we can just take the summer off. As for the pigs, you've butchered a deer--you can butcher the pigs. It will save us a bundle of money and it might be a good experience to have under your belt (I nearly choked on that one). Everything is going to be just fine."
He was feeling much better.
So we headed for "Farm King" to look for devices we might need in order to pursue this butchering venture. On the way I began thinking about the morning's events, and when I reached the point in my thoughts where we had called the butcher to see if it mattered if we brought the pigs in dead, I started laughing. . . hysterically.
"What are you laughing about?" asked my husband.
Well, it's difficult to talk when one is laughing hysterically, but I managed over a two-mile spread to choke out the telling of the thoughts which had brought me to the point of hysteria. Then I sputtered, "Uh-oh, I'm going to start crying!"
My husband knew what that meant, because he's seen it before. It doesn't happen often, but when I'm truly stressed, that hysterical laughter can turn in a split second to sobbing. So he asked, "You mean because of the trauma in our lives?"
I squeaked, "Yes."
Then he said with a tone of incredulity underlying his voice, "But I thought you told me everything was going to be all right!"
I thought a second then squealed, "I lied!" I managed to not cry, and the exercise in levity did us all a world of good.
That night at dinner our verse had changed. It went something like this:
No little piggies went to market
All the little piggies stayed home
No big freezer full of pork chops
Our little piggies just roam
And this little wife cried wee! wee! wee!
All the way home
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