As I was walking to the pasture to water the pigs today I felt so exhilarated by the new life I could see everywhere. I feel this way every Spring, but this one is even more special. Not only have we survived a hard winter but I have my own new life coming in October to think about and plan for. With these wonderful thoughts running through my head I lay back in the pasture and waited for the water trough to fill.

Here I was, enjoying the sunshine and the green grass tickling my legs with my hand resting on my non-existent baby bump and thinking happy wonderful thoughts…Suddenly my face was attacked by a very muddy puppy, my Labrador shook pig water all over me, and I realized that I was laying on a pig turd.

Oh well, that’s how life goes isn’t it. One minute you are blissfully enjoying the warmth of a good day and the next you are slimed with mud, covered in dirty water, and realizing that all along you have been laying in poop.

I choose to embrace what life throws at me though and removed the turd, carefully examined the grass for any other stray ones, scraped the clumps of mud from my face, and lay back down to continue my happy Spring day. Such is life on the farm.

At the time I began college, I had been married for about a year. Almost five years ago during the summer after my first year in college, my first husband was killed in a car accident. I continued college, but a year later in 2006 I decided I wanted to make some changes. After applying and being accepted as a transfer student by Texas A&M in College Station, I sold my house in Gladewater, TX, packed up my two horses and my dog into a horse trailer with living quarters and drove North and West. I had no definite plans except to be gone until I had to start the next Fall semester in 3 months. I never had any idea where I would stop for the night, but managed to find farms, fair grounds, ranches, and other places to stay along the way. I eventually made it to the Canadian border in Northwest Montana and back again. The states I traveled through included Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas (completely by accident), Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana. Through staying at farms and ranches and meeting so many great people, I decided that I would like to become a large farm animal vet rather than a horse vet.

One night in late August of 2006 while driving through a mountain pass in Colorado, this guy called me. I remember mostly being struck by how much this guy could talk and second by how strong his Texas accent was (until I met Nathan my accent was very mild, enough that I had people from up North ask if I was from the North; not so much anymore). He had called me because some friends of his (my second cousins twice removed or something like that) had told him that I needed a place to stay with my horses and trailer when I moved to College Station. He gave me the name and number of a place where he had stayed in his RV while living in College Station, and then talked about a bunch of other stuff I can’t even remember. I had been unsuccessful in finding a place to live so I called up the number and found a great place to stay only 2 miles from campus. I never called him back even to say thanks.

A few days before the semester started in late August, I was out buying my text books when he called again to see if the place had worked out. When we got to talking I couldn’t believe how much we had in common in how we felt about animals, life, God, the environment, and more. I had been looking for a farm to visit and do some work on as I was told the more experience I had with as many animals as possible the better chance I had of getting into vet school. After finding out that Nathan had just about every farm animal, I asked if I could come up and visit and work with him a few days to get the experience. (I did drive 4.5 hours for this experience one way so I have to admit that I was interested in more than the animals).

After meeting and working with Nathan I started actually calling him back. We were married the following January, 2007. I transferred to Texas A&M University-Commerce where I finished my bachelors degree in pre-veterinary Animal Science (basically animal science with a bunch of physics, biochemistry, etc. added) in December 2009.

For the most part life on the farm has been a dream come true for me. As I said my dream from the time I was a little girl was to have a farm, but becoming an adult and understanding reality, I chose the next best option of becoming a vet. I love the medical and scientific part of becoming a vet and may still go to vet school in the future, but I would much rather be raising my own animals than taking care of everyone else’s. Our farm is far from perfect and sometimes it is discouraging to look around and realize how far we still have to go to become the farm and business that we would like to be for ourselves and our customers. However, I am fully aware of how fortunate I am, and I will always be thankful to God for bringing Nathan and me together even if it was against my will :) “And now you know the rest of the story”, as Paul Harvey would say.

Nathan’s mothers side of the family raised cotton, oats, corn, sorghum, cattle, hogs, a family garden, and custom baled and hauled hay for people on the blacklands. Nathan’s dad’s side raised sweet sorghum cane for cane syrup, oats, corn, peanuts, hogs, and ran a cane syrup mill and syrup business along with growing a family garden on the sandy land. One of Nathan’s aunts and her husband still live on some of the original family land purchased in the 1870s on the courthouse steps of Jefferson, TX. Jefferson was a large town at that point in time and a major entrance point for many Texans. Nathan and I are some of the last, and definitely some of the youngest members of his family directly involved with farming in Fannin County.

As the years went by some of Nathan’s families farming enterprises changed. His dad grew up helping out on several farms near his grandpa’s homestead. They always had some calves, hogs, and chickens along with a large family garden to provide food for the family table. His dad ended up with a small old-style Hereford herd by the time he was in High School, but Nathan’s grandpa made him sell the herd to help pay for college. Nathan says that he doesn’t think his dad ever forgave Papaw Melson for that, even until the day he died.

Nathan’s dad passed away in 1995 at the young age of 43 from a heart attack that was apparently caused by an injury received to his heart in 1982 when he contracted Rocky Mountain Tick Fever. His death was just 21 days after Nathan graduated from High School. Nathan’s dad along with his grandpa on his moms side, Papaw Lackey, were addicted to raccoon hunting. When you are in the woods as much as they were, you get ticks. He died doing something he loved, raising cattle and hay.

Nathan’s mom grew up on the Lackey Family Land. She grew up involved in agriculture as well, but never really had a cowherd of her own like Nathan’s dad. His mom and her sister had plenty of critters to take care of ranging from baby raccoons and rabbits that Papaw Lackey would bring in from finding alone in the woods while raccoon huntin’, to dairy heifers, coon hounds, and pigs that Nathan’s grandpa used for supplemental income as he ran a taxi business, a gas station, and a hardware store/local freight route here in Fannin County.

As you can see agriculture is in Nathan’s blood. His mom and dad met in high school and ended up getting married while in college at East Texas State University (Now Texas A&M University- Commerce, where Nathan and I have both earned our degrees.) earning degrees in secondary math/science education and agricultural education, respectively.

You no doubt remember Sue from previous posts by Lauren, but, just in case you’ve forgotten, I’ll remind you. Sue is our pet sheep who was bottle raised by me. Nathan says WE raised her, but I don’t remember him ever getting up at 3:00 in the morning to feed her, so I raised her.

Sue is now quite big and mostly grown and thinks that she is a dog. She did not grow up with the flock of sheep, and really doesn’t know what to do with them when she happens upon the flock. I think that she believes herself to be above them, she certainly would never dream that she is actually the same species. Sue was raised around our dogs at the house and follows them everywhere mimicking them as much as is possible. She plays chase with our English Shepherd, Tirzah, follows my Lab Aidenne, tries to eat dog food every chance she gets, sleeps with our guard dog Mandy, chases the cats with our other guard dog Naomi, and generally acts like a dog. Of course the dogs follow us around the farm on our daily chores, and so of course Sue follows us as well. If Sue is accidentally left behind she will cry incessantly and run frantically up and down a fence until we go get her.

A few days ago I was putting out round bales of hay by myself with the tractor. Nathan was about to head to a farmers market. Aidenne, Tirzah, and Sue tagged along. I am always VERY careful when driving the machinery around the animals and for the most part they are very careful as well. But, how much common sense can you expect out of a sheep who thinks that she is a dog? All was well, until I started to pick the hay up with the tractor. The front-end loader of the tractor has an attachment called a hay fork, which consists of two very large pointed spikes to spear the hay with. These are not sharp, but they can be painful when run into (I speak from personal experience. I run into a lot of things). I am always worried that a cow or other animal will run into them and hurt themselves so I keep them up and out of the way at all times. Except, when spearing the hay, they have to be exactly at animal level. So, I lowered the hay fork and rolled slowly toward the bale. Then, just as I am about to spear the bale, Sue, who has been quietly standing to the side, decides that she needs to get to the other side where the dogs are, AND, you guessed it, she runs right between one of the spikes and the bale of hay. Luckily, I saw it happening, and was able to stop fairly quickly, but not before she was pinned against the bale. I backed up and jumped out of the tractor. As soon as she was unpinned, Sue ran around the bale and stood still looking very upset (you would be shocked at how many emotions a sheep’s face can show). I ran to her, and thankfully didn’t see any blood or other evidence of trauma. I gently checked her all over and could not find any broken bones, but my biggest worry was that she might be injured internally. She was obviously in pain and I felt HORRIBLE.

I carefully walked her back to the house and after checking her again, went to finish putting out the hay. She didn’t try to follow me or the dogs which was a bad sign. I knew that if one of her stomachs or intestines had been injured it would take a little while to show up and there wasn’t anything I could do. As soon as I got back I checked on her again. Her mucous membranes looked good (pale membranes are a sign of internal bleeding) but she was lying on the porch shaking and looking generally very bad. I felt SO bad for her. Of course Nathan didn’t help by telling me that it was all my fault that I had possibly killed our pet sheep. I tried covering her up with a blanket, but she was still shaking so I went to plan B. By this time Nathan was gone, as well as Lauren (Lauren had her ACT Exam that day.), so I was on my own. I knew that Sue needed to stay warm (it was a cold day) so I decided she was going to have to come in the house. The bathtub seemed the safest place to put her so I lined it with blankets, got her up, and walked her through the house and into the bathroom.

This is where it got a bit sticky. As I mentioned earlier, Sue is mostly grown up and weighs at least 100 lbs. I do weigh more than she does but not by a significant amount. I kept looking at Sue and then at the bathtub and back at Sue. Hmmm, she wasn’t going to jump in on her own. There was only one way to do it, I had to pick her up and put her in. I looked at Sue again (Who looked very dejected, by the way.) and prayed “please God help me get her in!” I managed to lift her over the edge of the tub, but then there was the problem of setting her down when she wasn’t wanting to stand up. So, I sort of gently dropped her into the tub, poor Sue! She ended up basically on her back with all 4 legs in the air just looking at me like, “What are you going to do to me next?” I carefully righted her onto her chest where she could lay down normally. The whole time she never struggled (very unusually for Sue) but seemed resigned to her fate. The next step was to get her some pain meds so she could feel better. She didn’t enjoy the shot, but pretty soon she seemed a little happier.

For the rest of the day, I sat inside working and watching Sue in the bathtub. She sounded so pitiful! For most of the day she lay quietly groaning and occasionally drinking water I brought her. I checked her temperature and gave her more pain meds, as needed, and just watched. I still wasn’t convinced that something may have been punctured inside, and that she wasn’t going to make it. Then I walked in to check on her and lo and behold, she had stopped groaning and was peacefully chewing her cud! There is nothing so immensely reassuring as seeing a ruminant chewing their cud. At that point I felt pretty confident (and EXTREMELY relieved) that she was going to be okay. Finally that night, when Nathan walked in the door she “Baaad” to him, and got up like she was ready to get out of the tub. She still isn’t quite her old self, and is obviously still hurting (she likes her pain medication!), but I think we are out of the woods. We all hope to bring you many more Sue stories and wish her a long, happy, safe, and smarter life.

The last time Ellen tried to teach Erin to suck a bottle he got so angry that he accidentally learned to walk on his three good legs. After about an hour of fighting to get him to suck, she finally put the rest of the milk down him with the tube, again.

The next morning, she went out to repeat the process only to find this: She said she was so relieved she almost cried. He finally learned to nurse and has apparently decided to live.

Ellen and Nathan loaded Erin into the wheelbarrow and carted him over to the cow chute. They put his mom in the chute and started milking her by hand. She behaved very well considering the circumstances. Her colostrum came out thick and sticky, very similar to sweetened condensed milk.

Ellen and I tried to get some of it into Erin but any sucking that he did on the bottle was very half-hearted. He really wanted us to leave him alone so that he could sleep but that wasn’t an option. Ellen would hold his head up with the bottle in it while I vigorously rubbed his gorgeous silver fur. After trying to convince him to suck the bottle for about half an hour Ellen finally gave up and decided to tube feed him.

Tube feeding is a last resort for a few reasons. First, you have a little better than a fifty-fifty chance of actually getting the tube down the right pipe so that you are siphoning milk into the stomach instead of the lungs. It is also important for a baby to get the chance to actually suck at first or they seem to lose the natural urge to do so.

In this case, it was a choice between forcing the colostrum into his stomach or watching him die of hunger. Thankfully, the tube did go into his stomach. When we left him he was finally holding his head up which we take as a good sign. Now we wait to see if the colostrum is enough to give him a will to live.

~~~~~

Later in the day, Ellen noticed Erin trying to get up. His left hind leg seems bound up so that he has to balance on the other three. If you’ve ever seen a calf try to balance on four legs you can imagine how hard it must be to balance on three. We hope that his leg will relax and function normally.

We’re encouraged that he’s trying and try to feed him with the bottle again. He seems to finally be catching on to the idea that if he sucks the food comes faster.

DISCLAIMER: I am not advocating flip-flopping or barefooting around livestock, so please do not engage in this behavior at home or any other time.

This seems like a fairly simple concept, but I am a slow learner sometimes, or maybe just too stubborn to change my ways. For the first 12 years of my life I lived barefoot. This isn’t hard to do in Texas, even in the winter. And yes, I did spend time in the little snow and ice we occasionally got barefoot. Through this period, I also developed a paranoia and aversion to stickers. In East Texas where I grew up we had what I call onion flowers that came up every spring. I loved these flowers and still do. They are small white flowers with a wonderful scent (only the picked stems smell like onions) and perfect for a little girl to pick armloads of. However, they seem to grow quite well right alongside East Texas stickers. I don’t know the name of the stickers but when you step on them they come off in your feet in the hundreds. I remember more than one occasion of picking onion flowers barefoot and ending up in the middle of a huge patch of these stickers. Now I was in a real dilemma. I couldn’t sit down to get the stickers out because I would end up with stickers in my hands and other places, I couldn’t stand on one foot because they were both full of stickers, as soon as I put one foot down it would immediately be full of stickers again, and I didn’t want to walk on feet full of stickers to get out of the stickers. After standing a few minutes in pain and trying to find a place on my foot to stand that didn’t have stickers, I would painfully hobble out of the patch and get them out. I still wonder why I never learned to wear shoes while picking flowers, but being barefoot was just so natural it never occurred to me. So, add livestock to this mindset of mine.

When I started working with horses as a teenager I had to wear shoes to protect my feet from the inevitable occurrence of getting stepped on. This led to years of boot and tennis shoe wearing almost all of the time. As soon as I stopped working around horses for a living I ditched the boots. Of course I still wear them when riding and usually when working around the cows but I have to admit that I am a little lax when it comes to other areas. Now that I am a smarter and wiser adult, I don’t go barefoot, I wear flip-flops. This wise change comes from my sticker paranoia (although thank the Lord we don’t have those stickers in North Texas) and because our black land clay becomes so hard it is almost as bad as stickers, and of course there are the cow piles, although they are just a little warm and squishy, not too bad. Like I said, I don’t like my feet being in shoes, and flip flops are just so easy to slip on when I need to check on things. I have forced myself to wear them only when I am doing relatively safe things like checking water, but even this isn’t necessarily safe.

So, last week I was checking the water tanks in my flip flops. I mean, the animals don’t usually run over you when filling up water, USUALLY being the key word here. I filled up the horse’s water without incident, they were way off in the pasture and my toes were never in danger. The cows were fine so I moved on to the pigs. As is often the case, this early November has been quite warm. Although not warm enough to warrant filling up the pigs water holes, they apparently thought that it was and had decided to flip their water tanks over to make their own water holes—this was a first with these water tanks as they are quite heavy. Apparently they had done this right after I watered them the last time so they had been several hours without water. As soon as I started filling them up, here comes the entire herd of pigs acting like they had not seen water in DAYS (not true of course but they always exaggerate). Not only does this lead to lots of fighting over the water, but they are quite smart and know that the water comes from the water hose. This means that they are determined to get the water hose out of the tank so that they can get water NOW. SO, I have to stand right by the water tank holding the hose and exposing my bare feet to the sharp trampling hooves of 300-400 lb hogs.

After realizing I had them beat on the hose trick, they promptly decided to turn the tank over meaning that I had to try and hold the tank down along with the hose. In the midst of this, one pig grabs another by the ear (they always go for each others ears, quite brutal really) and the pig with the bit ear jumps backward onto, you guessed it, my foot. I was by myself except for the pigs and said some rather mean things which I won’t repeat. I also jumped around on one foot for several minutes (why does it always seem to feel better to move after smashing an appendage?) in which time the water hose had again been pulled out, pigs were trying to flip the tank from both sides which resulted in a 180 degree turn of the tank but no flipping, thank goodness, and one smaller pig was flipped into the tank by a big pig. The pain subsided somewhat, I returned the hose, left the tank in its new position, and the pig in the tank (she did figure out how to get out) and spent the next 30 minutes hopping from one foot to the other trying to protect my remaining toes.

The moral of the story isn’t earth shattering, and I probably should have figured it out before my foot was turned green and blue, but here it is: Friends don’t let friends water pigs in flip flops.
P.S. I thought about taking a picture of my foot for this entry but decided to spare you the gory details.

Ellen

So, the neighbors think we are crazy. We had one whole herd of pigs running in our front pasture this past summer which happens to be right on the highway. I never anticipated the number of interesting comments and curious people we heard from regarding our pigs. Most of them consisted of helpful people informing us that during the day when we weren’t watching, an entire herd of wild pigs was wallowing in our pond. We thanked them kindly and continued to allow this mysterious herd of “wild” pigs to roam our pasture. On more than one occasion, cars stopped on the highway to watch these red “wild” pigs root, run, and eat in the pasture. Apparently they missed the huge red feeders that were conveniently placed in the pasture full of hog feed for the “wild” hogs, but this herd of pigs was quite the neighborhood sensation for the summer. While out feeding the pigs one day on a back field, I had an older gentleman stop and talk to me about our pigs for a while. He actually remembered that pigs used to be raised outside as a matter of course. It was a great conversation hearing stories about when he used to raise pigs and as he drove away, I had the satisfaction of knowing that at least one person in Fannin county didn’t think we were crazy, AND didn’t think our farm was overrun with wild hogs.

Yesterday, I went out to the pigs pasture to make sure they could still get the feed in their feeders—when it has been wet outside the feed tends to get humid and cakes up in the feeders. All of the pigs were around the feeders (about 20 pigs) and I decided to walk down the hill first to check the pasture, fence, etc. before going to the feeders so as not to be overrun by pigs. Two of them spotted me and proceeded to gallop after me screaming at the top of their lungs. Obviously they could not get to the feed and were letting me know. I ignored them and kept walking. Now, the entire herd realizes that I am in their pasture and that I am walking AWAY from the feeders. Mass pandemonium breaks out and they all start running down the hill after me, all screaming. Right at that moment, a truck drives by. They slowed down and crept by to watch the woman calmly walking down a hill with 20 300-400lb screaming pigs chasing her down. Now, all of these pigs are ready for slaughter, and several are beyond ready, meaning that they are quite fat. They have big fat rolls that jiggle between their back legs as they run. So, by the time we had all reached the bottom of the hill, I was ready to walk back up and the pigs were out of breath. By the time I had reached the feeders at the top of the hill, the pigs were all strung out behind me panting. Perfect! I managed to get their feed loosened and ready for them just as the first ones were straggling up the hill. They stopped to catch their breath and dug in. Hmm, as long as I don’t mind the extra trek up the hill and back, and the neighbors watching, I think I have found the perfect way to feed the pigs without getting mauled. Of course, the neighbors already think we’re crazy, so no worries, right?

Ellen

This morning I woke to my cat, Judah, poking at my head with his paw. This isn’t just any poke, it’s his special patented Judah Poke. It starts with his paw on my head, but then it just lingers there while he gently inserts his claws into my skull. Just enough to be prickly and hair-raising but not enough to actually hurt. This is not my favorite way to wake up, but I have to say it’s effective.

I don’t try to fight for long, I roll over and open the door so he can go out. Instead he lays back down on the bed. “What is it you want, stupid cat?!” I don’t know (though I have a good idea) and he doesn’t say, so I lay back down. Minutes later, Tirzah, the brilliant but slightly crazy sheep dog wanders through the door that I didn’t close and whines expressively. I’m almost sure she was saying something about how Ellen and Nathan both abandoned her and she was so glad I was there to rescue her.

I nicely say something about how crazy and annoying she is and how awful Ellen and Nathan are and I can just see the little brain working behind her eyes. “Oh, good. She likes me right now which means that she wants me to jump on her bed.” “Don’t even think about it” I warn, even though I know the thinking part is too late. She removes her exploratory paw from my bed while her eyes lose their pitiful appeal so fast it was like watching a mask drop; they returned to their usual conniving look. The situation is almost as plain as if she had opened her mouth and said, “Hm, my method just needs a little more tweaking before she’ll do anything I want.”

During this time, Aidenne has heard a happy voice from the other room so she comes to try her luck at being allowed on my bed. She isn’t quite as tactful as Tirzah so she gets two paws on the bed before reluctantly retreating in lieu of my threatening explosion. I finally get up, just to find that all that whining from Tirzah about Ellen leaving her was bosh anyways. Ellen is sitting right there.

After I have my coffee, and get past the jolting overly sweet last gulp where my sugar apparently sat, Ellen and I go to rearrange the cows. This seems to be a favorite farm pastime. It always reminds me of a life size sliding puzzle, where all the pieces are alive. First we bring the whole herd up to the house, then between the two of us we cut out the ones Ellen says aren’t supposed to be in the herd, then we chase herd 1 back to where they came from and put newly created herd 2 in their pasture. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Instead, one of the cows that were supposed to be cut into herd 2 wasn’t with the herd at all. So, we go on a hike to find out if she’s dead. After we encompass the two pastures that she was supposed to be in and figure out that the white hump we think is her is just another sheep, we see her, yet another pasture over, all by herself, munching on grass. We don’t know for sure how she got in there but we do find that if she is under only a little bit of pressure, instead of going through the gate we opened for her, she is quite capable of jumping the electric fence.

We all mosey on back to the rest of the herd, encourage her to walk through herd 1 to arrive in herd 2 and then help them all go back to their appropriate pastures. Cow arranging completed. I didn’t even tell you about the moment I almost got stuck between two saucy mares fighting over two buckets of alfalfa pellets, or the bull that we left on the wrong side of the electric fence he broke through, or coming so close to losing my boot in knee deep mud. I also got to scratch my obnoxious horse, who liked it so much that he looked pleased in spite of himself.

The point is that I love it that my horse is obnoxious, the mares are saucy, the cow is unpredictable, the bull is happier on the other side of the fence, Aidenne has no tact, Tirzah is crazy and smart, and what Judah really wanted this morning was just my attention. I absolutely love the fact that they are alive.

After I scratched Scoshi (my obnoxious horse) I put my head against him for a second to feel Life itself. I feel the warmth of his blood moving, the softness of his fuzzy winter coat, and I can hear his heart and feel his lungs rising and falling, and after a second his skin twitches like I am an overgrown fly he wants to get rid of.

I love it that when it comes right down to it, genius scientists really don’t know anything more about what life is than I do. I love it that I can’t create it, that I can sometimes preserve it, and I can always marvel at it. Life really and truly is magic.

I know that bad things happen, really bad and pretty often. Just focusing on animals, they eat each other, maim each other, get run over, get sick, get caught in fences, drown, starve, and everything dies in the end. I still maintain that the truly amazing thing is not that life includes pain and ends in death, but that it ever begins or survives in the first place.

Life is stunningly right.

It’s raining. Still. After two and a half weeks. When I stopped to get gas this morning before heading to school (yes, I am STILL in college), two old geezers drinking coffee in the dark outside the gas station asked me “so is it gittin muddy out on Sloans Creek?” My reply, was “yep, about hip deep now.” Later I pondered why two older men would be drinking coffee out in the fog/rain in the dark in front of a gas station, but then we live in Dodd City so I guess that answers it.

Anyway, as I was saying, it has been wet. Now, for those of you who do not have anything but concrete in front of your house, or for those of you who live on sandy land, you really can’t understand what wet really means on Sloans Creek. We live on blackland, or as it is more fondly known, “black gumbo.” This means that for most of the year the ground is so hard that it develops cracks up to two inches wide and I don’t even know how deep—I can’t see the bottom (we actually lost 2 piglets in cracks one year.) The clods of dirt are so hard that they can’t be broken apart with a hammer—no exaggeration. Then, for the other part of the year it rains and within 24 hours the ground becomes mud the likes of which have never been known before. Not like the fun mud I grew up with making mud pies in East Texas, this stuff has a life all its own. It sticks to everything and quickly becomes knee deep. Now, I was exaggerating a little when I said it was about hip deep, but knee deep is very accurate. The knee deep stuff wouldn’t be so awful without the stickiness. Add deep and sticky and you might disappear without a trace. A couple of weeks ago, when the rain had just started I went out to feed pigs by myself. Hours later when I returned caked in mud from head to toe, Lauren (my sister) commented that as the time went by, she had wondered if it was possible for someone to get so stuck in the mud that they really couldn’t get out. Of course, she admitted she didn’t think enough of me to come and check, but the thought did cross her mind.

A couple of winters ago I was out feeding the pigs in the mud (the story of my life) and sunk up over my knee high mud boots. This is bad, but it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if I hadn’t been holding a bucket of feed and there wasn’t a 500 lb very hungry boar in the pen with me. Now, I am only 5’3″ and when you take into account that I was sunk over my knees in mud, I was now about 3’3″ tall. Needless to say, I sacrificed the bucket of feed so as to not be flattened permanently into the mud. Then there was the problem of getting my legs back out of the mud. My legs came out but the boots did not. All of this time I was trying to not fall on my face, which until you have struggled to get unstuck in knee deep mud you can’t really understand what a precarious position this is. I was cold, wet, muddy, and now mad. So, I did the only logical thing and left the boots to finish feeding in my socks. I survived but the socks were never quite the same. I once had a very similar thing happen with my legs stuck in the mud and then a pig ran between my legs, but that’s a different story.

In this current round of rain and mud, I was feeding pigs (I told you that this is the story of my life!) and had to bend over to scrape caked feed out of their feeders where they could eat it. Even without mud this is not a good position to be in. I weigh considerably less than most of the pigs, and when they crowd in around me to start getting at the feed, and I am bent down, it can get a little scary. Then add THE MUD and it gets a lot worse. To combat this problem and the possible loss of life and limb that could ensue, I take Aidenne, my Lab with me. Her job (and she loves it) is to keep the pigs away from the feeders until I finish. Sometimes she gets a little too enthusiastic but she saves my life/limbs so I don’t get onto her too much. This particular time, the area right in front of the feeders had become muddy soup. Stinky, filthy, muddy soup. I walked over to the feeder and was bending down in this soup when a large pig came up. Aidenne, in her zealousness, barks and gives the pig a small nip on the butt. The pig was quite surprised, squealed, and took off at a dead run, in the soup, right in front of me. The result was that his back legs kicked muddy soup all over me from my legs to my hair. I was drenched in stinky, filthy, muddy, pig soup. It didn’t taste as bad as I expected it would. The up side is that I should now be immune to every bacteria known to man.

Now I do realize that the rain, and subsequent mud isn’t the weather man/woman’s fault, but I think if they come up with a “revised forecast” one more week, I’m going on vacation.