What Once Was a Piglet Is Now a Hog

It’s a beautiful “false” spring day in Mississippi. I can almost hear the plant and animal life coming back from the gloom. Mimi and I took a walk down our long road that we live on and had a phone chat with our daughter, Mia. We are a few weeks ahead of South Carolina's weather so she was surprised when I gasped about how white my legs were during my maiden voyage with shorts on. She said they were in the middle of a wet and chilly weather pattern so she was inside making a batch of kombucha and preparing meals for the week. Mia is also in the process of packing her things so she and Cody can put that house up for rent as they are about to get married and live at the house they presently call “his”. They have been getting prepared to mesh all their stuff including pets. They already have an army of chickens and 4 or 5 goats. Cody has a great dog named Montana and Mia has her mostly Jack Russel named Willow. She also recently took in a poor kitten from the nearest dumpster. She just got back from the vet with the cat previously known as Crusty but whom now has a much more refined name of Winston. Apparently Winston got himself into a barnyard squabble that caused his tail to have to be amputated. Now she has a dog with a nub and a cat with a nub and the goats are all nubs. It looks like they are going to create a family of nub tailed animals. They both love those animals so much that they are willing to put up with the not so fun part of having a lot of crazy farm animals.

Goats want to try to get out, chickens like the game of escape, only to wind up in trouble from being exposed to all the varmints that we try to protect them from by putting them in a fenced area. Keeping all the animals fed, watered and healthy has its challenges, you have to be there for them in the rain or the sleet or the snow, just like the mailman. They have a wonderful garden in the back yard which apparently looks like a salad to the goats and the chickens like to clean the insects and bottom leaves off the plants but sometimes they pull on the plants just a little too hard. For these reasons Mia and Cody built a fence out of pallets to subdivide the yard between the goat family, the chicken family, the garden, the dogs and last but not least, them. Their fence looks great, really nice and neat.

They brought home a bunch of pallets, drove “T” posts into the ground and slid the pallets over the posts, the sturdy pallets made a great looking and sturdy fence that, so far, is keeping everybody in their lanes, that is if goats have lanes. I think goats might have a little too much inbreeding going on, they are just plane ole crazy and their pupils are turned the wrong way so they kind of scare me a little bit. There is a miniature goat farmer down the road from us. It is baby goat time around that farm, I have to admit the 3 day old day goats are about the cutest things I have seen all day. We loved having our goats when our kids (Human) were younger. We had our trials and tribulations with them (the goats) as well. They constantly tried to escape only to figure out that they were much safer where they came from because we had a bad dog that secretly stalked them and drug them out to the woods. Thank goodness that psychopathic dog disappeared one night. He probably got what he had coming, not sure but he was not missed. I suspect he had something to do with our barn cats going missing from time to time. We had pheasants, doves, turkeys and all kinds of the crazy chickens and ducks when we lived a little farther out. It was a blast having all that to take care of while our kids were still with us. We figured they would either grow up with that lifestyle running through their veins or they would run from that lifestyle as fast as they could.

It turns out that both of our children and their spouses love the good parts about it farm animal life that they are all engrossed in the fun. It looks like what once was a puppy is now a dog and what once was a piglet is now a hog, in other words they grew up into it. We are happy for them, there are not many things that are as satisfying as having a successful, fun weekend of having so much to do in your own back yard that you don’t have to sit around and pine about what all you could be doing and eating and spending money on. Sometimes at the end of one of those days you look at the time and realize you have completely lost track of time. You don't really get to lose track of time during the work week since everything we do is based around time. Get up on time, make it to work on time, get some lunch for a specific amount of time and there is always quitting time. I love to not know what time it is on those days that we don't leave the yard, we just kinda go with the sun up and sun down bit. Those are our best and favorite days, we have to be purposeful about not keeping up with time. Changing the tunes with our phones we have to be careful not to see the time blaring at us. Fortunately my belly gives us a pretty good idea about generally the time. Time to eat! I am a hungry dude,

I have to eat 5 or 6 times a day. I don’t fight it, I’ll go in and make my favorite snack ever. I start with a filling smoothie which lasts until around 10:30 then I get to my peanut butter, banana and honey on wheat bread that makes me so happy and gets me through to lunch. I’ll have a full lunch followed by a coffee, that gets me through until about 4:00 when I have a poor mans apple pie which is an apple and some nabs (peanut butter crackers). By 7pm I’m like bear hungry for a full dinner, that finishes me off for the night. I sleep good and wake up so hungry I could eat a frozen dog. I spend some time in the evenings getting all of that prepared for the next days high metabolism rampage that keeps me ticking.

St. Paddy's day festivities will be happening in Jackson this weekend. I imagine if the weather gets right there will be a crowd of happy people reveling in the “false” spring sunshine. I’m sure we have all had enough the gloomy winter weather and we are ready to don our white legs together. That tradition has gone for a long time. The St. Paddy’s Day party in Jackson is a great time especially for running in to old friends and catching up with people as we all come out of hibernation.

Well, here I go again, with the time change I have been sitting and writing out by the pond with Mother Nature and somehow it got to be 7pm and my stomach is growling at me again. I think I’ll head in and feed the beast. Hoping to see some familiar faces this weekend and hoping you are enjoying this wonderfully slow arrival of spring.