First Farm Memories

My first memory of the farm starts with an early morning.  I would wake up, and go sit on the bathroom scale while my parents got ready for the day.  My Dad would let me brush his shaving soap on to his face.  Then we would all go down to the kitchen for breakfast, usually oatmeal or cream of wheat with butter and brown sugar, and watered down cranberry juice. 

After filling up, mom would bundle me up (it must have been fall or winter in my earliest memories) and I would go out to look at the pigs in the barn in our backyard.  I think we were in the process of expanding at the time, and must’ve run out of room for pigs, because we were using the old dairy barn behind the house as a makeshift pig pen.  The tall doors were wide open, and the biggest bay where hay wagons and such must have been stored had been turned into a makeshift pen, with fencing panels strung together.  Straw bedding covered the floor.

I went to see the pigs every day, sometimes multiple times a day, naming them.  My favorite was “Ketchup”, but I also grew fond of “Stuart”, and “Cupcake”.  None of these pigs were discernable from any of the others, and I usually just dubbed the first to come to the fence and nose my hand “Ketchup” for the day.  Sometimes I would bring scraps from the kitchen to throw over the fence as treats. 

After a while, the pigs got so big that I couldn’t go in the pen anymore at risk of being trampled, and finally they were shipped off to market.  We never had pigs in the dairy barn again, but I found a new outlet in the hot nursery. 

The hot nursery is where the smallest pigs of the litter are weaned where it was extra warm and they receive extra care.  Everything is small, and designed to transition the pigs from mom to on their own with as little disruption as possible.  I was also the right size for the hot nursery pens, and I would go and check on the little pigs each day, making sure they had water and food, milk replacer or electrolytes, and that the floor was nice and dry for them.  I named these too, “Sam” being my favorite that I would check each day, to see if he was making a good recovery after his rough start. 

Even though I wasn’t yet four years old, these early visits on the farm narrowed down my career choices considerably.  I figured I could either work on the farm with the pigs, become a fireman, or a ballerina.  I thought the farm was my most likely option for success, although looking at the world now it actually may have been the most unusual choice of the three.  Regardless, there may have been some stumbling blocks on the way, and a healthy dose of self-doubt, but here I am 25 years later, doing the same work as when I was four years old.