I started today with a walk, made myself a cup a green tea with honey, and then just sat and watched the keyboard for a while. Keyboards are really not interesting at all without fingers applied to them.
I eventually turned half a heart to my online acquaintances and came to Joshilyn Jackson’s April 10th entry – One of These Stories is Probably True. Joshilyn is the author of two books I have greatly enjoyed, gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia. I can’t wait to read her third which she talks about in this entry.
But the direction I was going was that Joshilyn's entry reminded me of my own collection and since I'm fighting a momentary non-productive funk, I thought I'd go ahead and share here.
When I was about eight, I decided I needed a runt pig to love and pet. I’m sure I must have been inspired by Fern of Charlotte’s Web, though I don’t remember specifically reading the book or having a particular attachment to it. Anyway, my folks were extremely willing to indulge. I ended up with Molly, a beautiful little piglet from a neighbor’s farm. She was, indeed, little. I fed her with a bottle and played with her every day. Before long she grew into a great enormous marvel of a sow who delivered us a couple of litters of piglets – of 12 and 13 if I remember correctly.
Molly’s story ended with something about another farm where she could be free and happy to raise babies and mingle with other pigs. I know that truthfully, my mother had begun to worry about me feeling so free to hang out in the pen of such an enormous animal. Momma sows are known to be viciously protective of their young. (My dad’s fingers are probably itching to write me right now, ready to tell me what REALLY happened to Molly, but I beg of him to leave me with my blissful childhood memory of Molly going off to have more little pig babies and live happily ever after.)
Anyway, the short of the Molly story is that for many years after I was that pig girl. Through the fourth grade in school, I actually remember signing my name to school papers – Tracy “Pig” Million. I eventually amassed a collection of piggies that numbered somewhere around 300 if you included all the posters, stuffed animals, banks, figurines, etc.
Along about my mid-teens, I packed ALL those piggies in a box and stored them in the attic. They stayed there until we moved back to Kansas in 1997. By then, I was married and had a child. My piggy days were far behind me. Yet, somehow in aftermath of my mother’s passing and all the cleaning and sorting that ensued at my parents’ house… I ended up with that box of pigs. I even found the original shelf that my collection was housed on. I hung it on the wall in our laundry area and put my piggies back on display.
Sadly, the vibrations from the washing machine made the wall in the laundry area a bad place for the display of all things glass and ceramic. The entire shelf fell from the wall during a particularly productive cycle of laundry. We had ceramic tile floors. It was a sad, sad day for pigs.
You’d think the story ends here. But it doesn’t. I still had the box my collection had been stored in for all those years; they hadn’t been back on display for very long. Instead of dumping little piggy pieces in the trash, I put them all back into the box. I even wrapped some of the more intact pieces, the ones lucky enough to land on unwashed laundry rather than tile floor, back in newspaper. I cried a few tears, but not near as many then as 10 years (2 moves) later when I was unpacking boxes at our current house and I opened that box to discover shards of so many little pigs.
The fact that I carried around a box of broken pig figurines for 10 years probably says way more about what’s inside my head than I should probably be willing to reveal. I did toss them, by the way… except for the few that were salvageable. Those that remain surround my writing desk now.
I guess I’m glad that they’re there. On occasion, it helps to look up and remember when I was that “pig” girl. But more than that, I like the memories of the stories and people connected with each one.
Sleepy pig on the left was from my friend Kristi's mother. It sat on a shelf above their kitchen sink and one day when I was staying overnight, she just gave it to me. Little white pig has a 4-H clover painted on its back. It was given to me by my piano teacher in 1979. The wooden pigs were actually part of my mother's salt and pepper collection. My dad sent them home from Germany when he was in the army in 1959.
Pink pig on the left was from my Aunt Lynn. She was the best at finding cool and unique pigs for my collection. The momma with the litter is something I picked up as an adult. The white piggy bank I made at a ceramics class with my Grandmother, but my mom painted the eyes.
My mom bought me brass piggy when she was on an anniversary trip with Dad. The spotted pig with babies is something munchkin number one latched onto when she was just a toddler. The jade pig on the right is one my uncle brought me from China. The metal letter holder belonged to my Grandma Christena who died when I was six. It was given to her in 1965 by my sister and my brothers.
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