When I ran across this picture and did some quick math I discovered it was taken 45 years ago. There's a song by my favorite western music singer Ian Tyson that has a cowboy singing this line "Was it yesterday or was it fifty years ago." It was about some lost love, but the line applies to many situations, my hog picture included. That time sure has flown by! A couple years ago I wrote this poem and included it in my second chapbook:Slat shadows from a snow fence
lay on the backs of my pigs -
120 of them. Their heads are down,
eating, always eating, so much I
had to keep hauling feed pellets
from Newton's Feed Store at X
number of dollars and watch that bill
tally up, but then I had to feed them
to grow so they could be sold as feeder
pigs since they were still weaners.
The brood sows, fifteen of them, came
from a hogman in Owego Township, sand
hill country, some call it Hillbilly Heaven.
He told me They're just full of pigs!,
and I could tell he told me no lie
just by looking at their bulging
middles. I never fed 'em, they run
in the woods and eat acorns,
ground's just covered with 'em.
How much? I ask. A hundred
dollars apiece, and I'll haul 'em
for ya. So the deed got done,
my lot soon filled with litters
of little pigs and grunting moms,
all hungry all the time. I gave
those sows, raised in the wild
as they were, no different
treatment than the hogman gave
them, and they proved their self-
reliance by farrowing an average
eight shoats per. Well, things
worked out well for me, I sold
them when they reached 35-40
pounds each and made a few bucks.
As for the hogman, he hung himself
from one of the acorn trees.
