Timeless Tuesday: A Piggy Story

Mom and my sister: 1958

This story may end up being more fiction than fact by the time I'm done with it. It's one of those I loved hearing my mom tell when I was a kid, but to sit down and recreate it, I'm not entirely sure I've got all my facts straight.

What I know is that my folks raised pigs for many, many years. I have photos, and even some memory, to prove that. There must have been an early winter snowstorm the year my sister was born because I'm pretty sure part of the significance of this story was that my mom was very, very pregnant. The snow was bad enough that Dad got stranded at work. Mom was looking at a cold winter night alone in the house. When the power went off, she was looking at an even colder night alone in the house.

But the power being off posed another significant problem. There was a litter of brand new baby pigs in the barn. Without the heat lamps, the piglets would surely freeze. And when mom went to head outside to check on them, the snow was already deep enough that she couldn't get the door to the house open.

That's how my mother, nine months pregnant, found herself escaping from the house through the bathroom window. She took a suitcase with her to the barn, loaded up those baby pigs, and brought them back in the house to keep her company. It's a mental picture I've always had of my mother, pregnant and rescuing baby pigs in a snowstorm.

My brother, Barry, a few years later feeding another cute piglet.

**Fact Checking via the wonder of the Internet. It seems that there was an April blizzard dubbed "The Great Blizzard of 1957". If this is the same blizzard, my mom would have been, not greatly pregnant, but just three months along or so. So it would have been a late winter snowstorm, which really makes more sense than a snowstorm in mid-October. Also makes more sense in terms of a litter of pigs. However, the mental picture isn't quite as great as having a 9-month pregnant woman climbing out the bathroom window to rescue piglets in a snowstorm. The photos at this link are from Cimmaron, a town about 20 minutes or so from Dodge City, where my mom would have been stranded with her piggies.