Saying Goodbye To A Friend And Making Memories
Some Pig: The Adventures of Miss Piggy and Hung Chow
Sometimes decisions make themselves. We have this illusion that we are in control. We think that we are in the drivers’ seat, but we’re really just along for the ride, holding on for dear life. Our plans and preferences? Ha! We can have them but we can’t count on them being honored. That’s why it pays to be flexible and to invest in maintaining a sense of humor and a positive attitude.
December is a bit of a blur to me. So much happened. As I recall, it was about a week and a half ago when our pig made a decision for us. I had a great plan. My plan was to use her as a breeding sow. It’s a great way to 8 X one’s bacon supply if they have enough patience. She had a generally good disposition and wasn’t particularly destructive. Just a laid-back, 450 lb garbage disposal. I say 450 lb, but in actuality, I have no idea how much she weighed. We don’t have a pig weighing scale. It’s all guesstimation, but trust me when I say that she was a big ole girl.
The perceptive reader will pick up on my use of the past tense. It’s no accident. Over a few week period the most common utterance in our house became ‘Pig’s out!” Now that I think about it, that was the second most common utterance. First place goes to the collective grunts and sighs of frustration from our team of reluctant young farmers. I’m not sure how to phonetically spell out the sound, but if you’ve ever crossed paths with a teenager or a young adult, I’m sure that you have the idea.
I have no idea what got into her. She was about two years old and very, very healthy. For whatever reason, she began getting surly and nipping at people. Worse than that, she developed wanderlust. No fence could contain her. This was a huge problem, because her home was surrounded by orchards, plants and gardens. We began getting butt puckering calls from helpful neighbors letting us know that a pig was wandering around our property. She was so well behaved before this that many of them didn’t even know that we had a pig up to this point. We would drive home and the pig would follow us to the house like an over-sized, pudgy puppy. It escalated rapidly. She got out 6 times in about a two hour span and the necessary course of action became clear. It wouldn’t be prudent to take the risk of her injuring someone or getting injured herself. As it turns out, this pig wasn’t destined to be a mother. She was destined for the freezer.
I have no doubt that other people have experienced something similar, if not exactly the same thing before, but there is a special level of defeat that one feels when raising animals for meat and something happens to the animals as butchering day approaches. It’s especially bitter when a conscious decision was made to postpone butchering day and something happens during that extended time. Ultimately, the combination of this feeling and the potential for injury to other people or their property forced the decision.
This lead to an unanticipated adventure. It wouldn’t have done any good to get mad about it. It would only have made matters worse. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately depending on your perspective, it was about an hour before sunset and it was near freezing already. With the efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew and the appearance of something out of a slasher flick, we went to work. All of the kids chipped in and we had her dressed and chilling in no time. What a relief!
Of course, things couldn't be that simple, right? I’m up in the morning puttering around the house and off in the distance, along a fence line, I see a white flickering, similar to the waving the white handkerchief of surrender. It’s funny how something so tiny in the distance can catch one’s attention, but I guess that something in us notices things when they are out of place on our home turf. It’s also funny how something in us is capable of knowing exactly what that tiny flash of white in the distance is intuitively.
I grabbed the gun and hopped on the gator. I think it was in the low 20s at the time. What did I find when I got there? You guessed it. Cue the not so subtle hint in the introductory photo. Once that situation was remedied, we were able to get on with the work of processing Miss Piggy so that she could complete the transition from pig to pork.
The kids were amazing. Don’t tell them that I said so. If they ask, they were just alright. What struck me was their willingness to get in there and both work and learn without fear or timidity. That, and their persistence. We don’t process meat all the time, so there is some degree of brushing up that needs to be done. My trusty go to is a sage Brit named Scott Rhea. He has never failed me. At the end of the day, we had hundreds of pounds of meat in the freezer and even more impressive than that was that the mess was for the most part cleaned up by the time we hit the hay. More than that, we participated in a time honored Appalachian tradition and built a few memories in the process.
“We didn’t realize we were making memories, we just knew we were having fun.”
A.A. Milne
