Break and Cord and Pigs

My sister Linda hosted Thanksgiving Dinner at her house today. We always help each other provide the food, and this year we had more fun than usual with this planning process.

Those of you who know Linda well know about the precision she is capable of when it comes to proofreading tasks. She is the final pre-submission proofreader for Calvary Messenger. She has also written several books. In grade school she won first in the state in an English scholarship test. In our public high school she got the highest score in the school in a standardized English test that everyone took.

But when I received a meal-planning email with the subject line saying "break and cord," I was pretty sure something had gone awry. The message said "and yes Hannah, bread and corn would be great."

I hit "reply" and sent a one-word message: "Huh?"

Rhoda was more creative. She wrote later:
"If plans carry, Hannah, Christy and Joey will be headed for
Rons in the morning! So. . . that's right, someone else has
to bring the break & cord to our Thanksgiving meal. I am
happy to provide cord but don't have any break and am not
virtuous enough to offer to make some tonight or tomorrow
morning . . . Do any of you have some loaves in your freezer
that you'd be willing to share ???"

I wrote a note to Rhoda, with a copy to Linda, saying: "I read this subject line with a "wonder what this is all about?" sense of expectation. Linda, of all people, making two proofreading errors in three words! Unbelievable." I also offered to bake bread for the meal.

Linda wrote: "That's what I get for not proofreading my subject line."

I suspect that from now on break and cord will a regular part of our Thanksgiving tradition, just as Christmas pigs have become for the year's final holiday.

The "Christmas pigs" line comes from my Dad, who years ago was being grilled by Mom one December day about his earlier whereabouts. He admitted to having been at the livestock sale and, as I recall, was rather vague about where else he had been. "Well, what did you buy?" Mom wanted to know.

"Christmas pigs," Dad said.

Later he surreptitiously asked us girls to wrap a meat platter he had bought for Mom that day.

Since then, any purchase we want to be mysterious about is simply referred to as a "Christmas pig."

*******************

Somehow a few other pig stories often make it into the story telling that typically follows family meals.

I asked Dad how he used to move the pigs from the barn southwest of the house to the finishing unit at the west edge of the cluster of farm buildings--haul them or drive them? Marcus remembered that driving them was the usual method.

Myron remembered one time when a pig was escaping through a corridor in the south barn and he yelled at Lowell to head it off. Lowell stepped into the corridor just ahead of the pig's arrival, and the pig, surprised, no doubt, and desperate, reared up and placed its forelegs on Lowell's chest, bowled him over, and kept right on truckin', its hind legs planted on his chest also as it crossed his body lengthwise. Lowell had four hoof-shaped black and blue spots as a result, but no other major injuries.

Another time Myron happened to see a developing drama while Caleb was inside a small farrowing hutch and the sow that usually occupied the hutch was outside feeding. He knew trouble was brewing when the sow with babies inside went racing back inside the hutch to see why her pigs were squealing. Caleb caught on to the immediate danger just in time to bail out the tiny little ventilation opening near the peak of the hutch's back side. Myron reports that he launched himself horizontally through that opening and escaped without injury. No wonder Caleb decided to become a philosophy professor rather than a hog farmer.

Two other stories came from Myron's days of working for a farmer neighbor. Pack was inside a hutch one day nailing something down that had come loose when he felt the hot breath of an agitated hog. Instinctively he whirled around and used the tool in his hand to ward off the hog. The blow to the head dropped it cold. Pack ruefully surveyed the situation and pondered the tragedy of having killed a female just about to farrow. But all was well when she revived some time later and went on to deliver a nice litter of piglets.

Another time Randy and someone else were working desperately to load hogs for shipment, and one of them seemed impossible to corral. In a last ditch effort to salvage the situation, Randy hid somewhere with a 2 x 4 in hand while the other person chased the hog past his hiding place. One well placed blow and that hog lay just as still as Pack's accidentally-hammer-felled one had. Randy got the front end loader around and scooped up the comatose animal and deposited it in the trailer. Then he went to the house for a glass of iced tea. When he got back outside, all the hogs on the trailer were milling about with equal vitality, and he couldn't tell which one had arrived there by the unconventional route.

I remembered that my Dad used to deal with the most recalcitrant animals at loading time with a fairly humane method. He got a bucket and put it over the hog's head. Instinctively the hog backed up to escape the blinders. Usually it could be steered straight up the loading ramp, rear-end first, into the stock-racked pickup bed.

I don't have any particular longing to relive the good old days of having to man my post at the rear of the pickup stock rack, keeping the hogs already on the trailer from unloading themselves back into the pen. Under my dad's instruction, the rather primitive way I did this was by sliding two boards across the rear opening of the stock rack at an appropriate barrier height, with both ends of the board resting on the horizontal bars of the stock rack. The boards stayed in place while Dad's experienced eye was sorting out the hogs that were large enough to take to market, and while he and my brothers steered them toward the wall at the north end of the hog unit. At one end of that wall and parallel to it a ramp was set up with its leading edge resting on the bed of our farm pickup. Panels set along one side of the ramp formed a loading chute with the pen wall on the opposite side of the ramp. When the "hunting and gathering" was successful and another fat hog presented itself at the top of the ramp with Dad pushing from behind, it was time to jerk the boards aside to remove the barrier across the opening, allowing the new arrival entrance.

If we hadn't grown up on a hog farm, though, I wonder what animal stories we'd tell when the family gathers. The stories is one of the good reasons for keeping animals, and retelling them is part of what helps us remember that we belong together because of our shared experiences. It's a lofty calling for a pig--helping to keep a large, diverse family united . . .