Pig Hooey!

We Grenons have strange ways of entertaining company.

Last night my daughter, son-in-law, and grand-daughter came over for supper and a movie. It was a fairly normal meal, though rather casual as some of us ate inside and some ate outside, fending off black flies, mosquitoes, and dogs. We did a partial cleanup after eating and sat down to watch the videos. So far so good.

The real excitement came when my guests were getting ready to leave. Trista went to find her father who was over in the back 40 visiting the two pigs that Trahern and a neighbor boy are raising as 4H projects. We soon heard calls for help and Adam and I trotted over, leaving Elodie and Keiannah to play in the car by tooting the horn repeatedly.

Somehow, both pigs had escaped their pen and were running round and round its perimeter while being urged on by half a dozen children with sticks who were unsuccessfully trying to herd them into the pen. The pigs, having gotten a newfound taste of freedom, and seeing a wide world of foraging in front of them, most decidedly did not want to re-enter a pen that was de-nuded of every blade of grass and shrub that had been there not a week before.

Marc was in hot pursuit of one of the pigs and made a flying leap and landed on the smaller of the two pigs. The pig did not like this and with many a protesting squeal, wriggled mightily and with great vigor and got away. Again, Marc was up after it and this time managed to land squarely on the pig with Adam not far behind. At this, the pig began to shriek like a ring wraith in its death throes. I ran over and grabbed the pigs front legs and together the three of us hussled the wriggling bundle over to the pig pen and tossed it in. The pig immediately ran to its mud hole and coated itself in mud, perhaps with the hope that wrestling a muddy pig would be less to our liking and we would leave it alone.

The second pig was larger and faster, yet Adam and I managed to bring it down with great skill by collapsing on it. Sam ran up with a rope he had made into a halter, and Marc took my place on the pig and proceeded to put the rope over the pig's head and then hog tie the pig's feet. Unfortunately, in his excitement, he hog tied one of his feet to the pig as well. I had no intentions of dragging the pig AND Marc to the pigpen, so I told him to stop fooling around and untie his foot. For some reason, he bared his teeth at me.

We finally managed to disentangle Marc from the pig, and he and Adam quickly dragged the protesting porker to the pen and with a mighty heave launched it into the enclosure.

Our pleasure in viewing the newly imprisoned inmates diminished somewhat when we realized we were all covered in...