Saturday, April 15, 2006

Pigs

More news from the rural countryside.
I'm up here in this little house in seclusion, trying to finish a writing project. It's a perfect setting for writing, the landscape around me utterly silent. Woods, fields, stone walls, sky—that's it.
This afternoon I took a break and went out to walk the hour-long triangle. I started out past the big elegant Victorian farmhouse just opposite us, heading down the road past the dairy farm. As I walked past the Victorian house I glanced in past the white painted fence. There were some shadows on the other side I hadn't expected—I wondered if my neighbours had borrowed some sheep to graze the lawn down? I went closer, and heard an excited honk.

It was not sheep but a herd of energetic pigs, pink and brown and muscular, ears pricked and on the loose. What they were excited about was the garden—the perennial border, to be precise. There were ten of them, and they were hogs with a vision. The vision was of a perennial border without living inhabitants.

It was a lovely sight, if you were a hog—all that rich brown earth churned and rooted and turned up to the sky. If you were a gardener—well, it was a different sort of vision.

I walked down the road to the dairy farm, got in the pickup with the farmer and headed back up the hill with him. We spent the rest of the afternoon herding hogs. I don't know what we'll say to the neighbours. A visitation from outer space?

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