Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [106]
I’m up in the office reviewing notes for a story, and Jane is propped in the green chair again. She’s still a tiny little bean, and I can still balance her on my forearm, but she’s fattening up some, getting a little marshmallowy in the legs, and rounder in the face. Lately she’s been working on holding her head steady. She hasn’t quite got her cranial gyro dialed in, and there is a lot of bob and weave. Sometimes she’ll really get to wobbling, and you can’t help but think of Little Miss Shake-N-Bake. She’s also been working hard to summon her first laugh. We’ll make faces and her eyes will crinkle and her mouth will twitch up, but then she just sputters and gacks and hacks. The other night when Anneliese was bathing her in the bathtub, I leaned over and asked Jane if she was happy and I swear she said “Uh-huh!” but then it was back to happy drooling and there has been nothing since.
Here in the office now her face has begun to crumple. I switch the music from Tom T. Hall to Gnarls Barkley and turn it up. Her head bobbles in the direction of the speakers, and I have bought myself three more minutes.
Down beside the pigpen, the sweet corn is tasseling. I weeded it just once, and it came on remarkably well. The soybeans, on the other hand, have been all but swamped by the quack. It is midmorning, and Amy and I have come down to feed the pigs zucchini. If you just chuck whole zucchini in there, they tend to ignore it, but we’ve found that if you chunk it up they’ll have a go at it. Instead of using knives or even a spade, we slam the zucchini against the wire panels. If you do it hard enough, they dice themselves. It’s a very satisfying transformation. Cocklebur seems to be lagging behind Wilbur size wise. She’s nice and healthy looking, just smaller. I haven’t wormed the pigs, figuring that since they’re the first pigs on this patch in twenty years if not forever, it’s not necessary. Now I’m second-guessing myself, so I wait until Cocklebur goes over into the bathroom corner (pigs tend to defecate in one corner of the pen only) to do her business, and then I crawl over the panel and study the poop, kicking it apart with the toe of my boot. I don’t see any worms. Maybe she’s just smaller because she’s a girl.
I send Amy up to the house to turn on the hose tap, and we fill the wallow. This has become our favorite activity of the day. The pigs revel in the water, sticking their snoots into the stream, closing their eyes, and letting the water play over their cheeks and face. Sometimes they chomp at the water, and oftentimes Cocklebur gets so worked up she stampedes herself in tight stiff-legged circles, her chunky body teeter-tottering fore and aft. Then she flops at the rim of the wallow and slowly rolls until she goes over center and slides right in. When the sun is hot and the pigs are caked with dried mud, something about the water hitting their skin gives them the itches. They lean hard against the shelter and rub back and forth. Sometimes they back up to a steel post and wag their hindquarters back and forth to hit the right spot. Today I lean in with the grass whip and scrape it back and forth across each pig. The dust flies off their bristly hides, and they grunt happily. With Wilbur, if you hit just the right spot he groans and his knees give out.
On the way back to the house I notice the hose connection is leaking. The brass fitting is squashed to an oval. Apparently it got run over. I’m making a trip to town later today—I add a hose repair kit to the shopping list. Amy and I make sandwiches and eat them on the deck. We’ve had a great morning of being pals. After lunch,