I’m sure by now you are getting sick of me saying “up at 430.” Well, we were up at that time once again. Brett started out this season eating eggs and having a cup of coffee with me before he left. Today, he wanted nothing aside from ten more minutes of sleep on the couch and a promise that I will wake him when I see the lights of Coach’s car. That’s fine with me. More “Water for Elephants!”
Brett informed me that his girlfriend would be coming over after practice, so I get my jog in early in order to have time to clean the house before she arrives. My friend Cat has a saying, “If you’re coming to see me, stop by anytime. If you’re coming to see my house, call ahead.” While I would love to feel the freedom of this statement, I have major OCD when it comes to my house being clean, and with five children running around, feeding the beast of my desire for cleanliness is difficult at best and often leaves me with my mouth drooling and my heart racing.
The lack of perfection in my home is something I have had to learn to breathe through, just as other people breathe through paying their bills when they know from the start that they don’t have the adequate funds to do so. While I’m sure that learning to relax in a less than pristine environment is a good thing, I still secretly believe that so is my OCD. I love it. I relish in it. I roll in it like a dog rolls in poo. Okay bad analogy, because we all know how I feel about poo as well. But I will save that for another story.
I want my house to look as if the maid has been here all the time and I have such a hard time controlling myself that when the kids leave so much as a spoon in the sink, I call them to it and then look around in bewilderment asking them if they see “Alice” anywhere in the house? As you can see, I’m not fully on the verge to recovery yet, but due to other events of the morning, I was unable to get my dishes done before I had to retrieve Brett and his guest. I was mortified, apologizing for the mess, etc. Brett, always there to help like any good, loving teenage son would, looked around the kitchen and said, “What are you talking about Mom? This place looks cleaner than usual.” Had he not had a guest I might have cuffed him.
At noon, I took Brett’s friend home, delivered Maxx and Summer to Grandma’s for a two-day visit, and went on a parts run to Colfax. Wave’s mother has recently become my hero (not that she wasn’t already) but she has offered to take a small set of our brood on and off this week to help give me a break in harvest. Ahhh…
At 500 PM, The Ag teacher from Tekoa and his wife arrive to help us load up three of the five pigs that we will be taking to the fair. Just like last year, we will moving them to the FFA barn in Tekoa so that the kids can wash them and work them more intensely during these next to weeks. When we started raising 4-H pigs last year, we all wondered how in the world we were ever going to butcher them. A friend of Wave’s told him that by the time the pigs were ready to go to the fair, we would be ready to kill them. I love our pigs. They are like dogs. Loyal and affectionate. They seem to only want to please, but I clearly remember that last year I felt different by the time we loaded them. It sounds cruel, and it is only a fleeting thought, but as I watched the Ag teacher back the trailer into the stall, I had flashbacks from last year’s pig loading attempt.
The pigs were playful and jumpy as the teacher stepped in the stall to separate the three we will be taking to the fair. Dominus, Zagar and Alex were quickly separated from the other two, but by the time the gate opened on the back of the trailer they turned into 270 separate pounds of solid hatred, and the five of us were not enough to handle them. Especially with Jack singing to them loudly from atop a fuel tank next to the stall.
Within minutes, all three of them squeezed under the gate on the trailer and were out in the driveway before we could do anything to stop them. Brett lured them with every marshmallow we had and thank goodness managed to get them back in the fence. Pigs are smart, but they are also playful. They love to follow you, and marshmallows, but it will be over their dead carcasses that they will get in the back of a trailer. Like I said, they are smart!
It took over an hour and every bit of strength all of us had to get those three snorting, biting angry swine into the back of that trailer, and as the teacher closed the door I was already screaming “good riddance!” in the back of my mind; however, by the time we got to the barn and coaxed the pigs out of the truck and into their new pens they had returned to normal and we were quickly scratching their jowls again. All water seemed under the bridge between us, and we were almost sad to leave, but I knew in the back of my mind that tomorrow, bath day, was going to prove to be much of the same as it was at the barn and once again I would be thinking about how good pork chops are going to taste this winter.
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