There’s a party up there all the time, and they’ll party until they drop.

This year’s Pig Slaughter came and went, and was something less of a redneck riot than last time.    Notably, though, in the interest of slowly extricating ourselves from the hallowed land of cash capital, we kept alive a breeding sow, and sent her up the hill to the lady farmer neighbor with a passel of stiffied boars.

We’d kept this particular sow because she was so wonderfully even-tempered; The Native had christened her Sweetie, and she was the one of the bunch of seven who could be pat, and who wouldn’t try and eat you on sight.

But maybe seeing your friends murdered, plucked one by one over the course of two days, then being spirited away up a country road in a four-wheeler’s trailer and dropped in a muddy pen with a boar several times your size who immediately smells your heat and responds accordingly… maybe this is more than the porcine mind can bear.

So if you were Sweetie Pig, what would you do?  If you said “I would jump over the fence of the strange pen and rapist pig, bowl over any persons in my way, and make a break for it,” you would be correct.  And if you were my Native, and you said “I would chase her down and gently talk her down, and coax her back to the safety of the barn,” you would also be right.  And if you were the neighbor, you might follow them into the barn, in order to make a plan for what comes next.

And if you were the neighbor’s eager twelve-year-old son, and you were really jazzed at being part of a farm circus, you might enter that barn behind them all.  Naturally.

And if you were Sweetie Pig, you might see the opening where the boy didn’t close the door behind him, and you might make a bolt for it AGAIN, AGAIN knocking over the neighbor and jostling the boy, who in an effort to get his footing steps on the ponytail of his mother, the lady farmer.  And if you were the lady farmer, pinned to the ground by the foot of your son on your hair, the string of words that emanated from your mouth at this moment is the stuff of legend, the stuff that might parthenogenetically bestow nature’s blessing on our Sweetie Pig.  Or so we might hope.

Sweetie Pig was gently wrangled back into the barn, where she has stayed.  All attempts to introduce her to the lady farmer’s boars have resulted in similar circus acts, and whenever we inquire as to her status, the lady farmer neighbor grumbles back:  she’s a bad pig!  Rotten and spoiled!  She always jumps over the fence and has taught my pigs how!  Very high voltage fencing has been acquired.  We are assured there will be a pregnant pig in our future.

For the time being, Sweetie Pig is still holding out, ladylike.  Stay tuned for an update.