Grandpa and the Pig

Grandpa and the Pig

“Home is not a place, it’s a feeling.”

Cecelia Ahern

When my sister, Mary Ellen, got her first house, it was in a part of town where all of the properties were set up like little farms. She had a small house toward the front of the large rectangular lot, with a typical backyard, and behind that yard was a barn.

The long barn was on one side of the lot, which reached to the back of the property for her horses, goats and chickens. On the other side of the yard was a garden to grow food; corn, lettuce, tomatoes, vegetables of every kind.

My dad used to love to go over there; I think it reminded him of his childhood. He grew up in a small town in Kansas. Dad’s favorite thing to do in my sister’s yard was rake leaves. He found it relaxing after a hard week of work.

Mary Ellen’s neighbor had a pig, a very large pig, a Yorkshire with white, pointy ears. He probably weighed close to a thousand pounds, and he was about six feet long and nearly three feet tall. The pig liked to roll in the mud to stay cool on a hot day. A five-foot tall wooden fence ran the length of the property, separating Mary Ellen’s yard from her neighbor’s. The pig lived in a small mud-covered pen just on the other side of the fence.

One warm afternoon, my dad was out back, raking leaves under a huge walnut tree. It was fall, so there were quite a few to rake. He stopped to rest and went over to the fence to look at the pig as it was snorting around its pen. Dad was probably daydreaming about his grandfather’s farm, and stood there quietly for several moments, admiring the creature.

After a while, Dad gently said, “Hey pig,” and that’s when the trouble began. Because the fence was high, the pig hadn’t seen or heard my dad walk up. The pig was startled by Dad’s voice and, in panic, whipped its head around to see where the threat was coming from. Only Dad’s face was showing over the fence, and as the pig spun its head around, along with it came all of the slop from its snout. The pig slop went flying through the air, and with the greatest of ease, hit Dad square in the face.

Well, you can imagine my dad was fairly startled himself, and pretty grossed out too, standing there with a rake in one hand and pig slop all over. But after he cleaned up, he thought it was pretty funny, and enjoyed telling the story to the family. From then on, however, my dad made sure to let the pig know he was there before he went over to have a look.