Three... I mean, er... Two little pigs

The first year I had pigs, it was on a lark. And raising our own bacon in our backyard turned out to be way easier than I expected. I fed them some grain, a ridiculous amount of peanuts, and watched them get big and docile, roaming around under the trees in our backyard. 

This year's lot, on the other hand, turned out to be more than a handful of pain-in-the-ass. 

First there was that time they went missing, and lived in the woods for a month.

Then, there was the recapturing, and building a pig pen that would make the inmates of Guantanamo give that low whistle of respect that says 'Holy shit, brother. What did you do to get put in here?'

About two hours before the 'Coppa & Collards' dinner party, two of them managed to push their way out of even that fence, and take a little walk around the yard. I managed to get them back up to the pen, and told the boy to go in and get his mother. She came outside and looked at me like "These are your pigs, mister." 

"I'll grab the front side," I told her. "You grab the rear." And before she could say anything, I reached down and grabbed the front legs of one of the pigs. 

If you haven't had occasion to wrestle a pig yourself, you should know that an upset pig can squeal loud enough to be heard for miles. The saying "squeal like a stuck pig"  could also be "squeal like a pig you just tried to pick up".  

My Bride took one look and said "I am not picking up the back end of that pig. That's where they poop." 

"Would you rather to grab the squealy, bitey end?"

There was a lot of swearing. And a lot of pushing. And some more swearing. Most of it aimed at the pigs.  But we got them back in the pen.  

When we decided to move north to Maine, the logistics were all pretty easy. Except for the pigs. 

It was a corporate relocation, so we had a packing and moving crew helping us load up and take everything to storage until we could get into our new place outside of Portland. A very nice gentleman with a large clipboard and a measuring tape came by to do the inventory of our household goods. 

"Are those pigs yours?" 

I don't get asked that question every day. It would have been awkward to deny it. 

"We can't put the pigs in storage, you know..."

Thanks, funny guy. 

Fortunately, I had a plan. I have a buddy with a trailer who likes to go to Maine. He brought the trailer over one evening so that I could load up the pigs, and we could schlep them up to the great white north the next day. Loading last year's pigs was pretty easy. I figured I could handle this. 

Nothing with this group of pigs was ever easy. 

There was more shoving. A whole lot more cursing. And I only fell in pig crap twice. I began to wish that I had never found the pigs again after their escape. But eventually, they were loaded up, and off we went. 

I had called the sellers of our new house a couple of weeks before. "Listen, Peter. I need to bargain for a favor. I need to move the pigs in before the close date."  

Just a totally typical buying a house conversation to have. 

He laughed. He used to raise pigs.

I liked the couple we were buying the house from a lot. We didn't involve the realtors.  The Critter and I showed up for a few evenings in a row and built a new pen around the barn. 

The pigs settled in. And eventually, we closed on the house and moved the rest of our household good in. And ourselves while we were at it. 

These three pigs were on the small side compared to last year. I am pretty sure the month in the woods foraging didn't help. They grew taller, but didn't put on as much weight when they were young. And maybe it's just their litter. They were smaller, and more active. They took to their pen with gusto, rooting up all the mint and clover, and enjoying themselves immensely. The end stall of the barn was theirs, so they had a place to huddle and sleep. And there is a huge oak tree across the driveway, so the kids would scoop up acorns to add to their meal. 

Other than the fact that I had to fetch water in buckets from the pond down the hill, it was a pretty terrific setup. 

Soon, though, The Spare got listless. 

She lay around for days. I wasn't sure if she was just getting lazy as she grew or if there was something wrong.  She moved. Just slower, and with less pep than the other two. 

I watched her for a while, and figured that, well, it was already early October, and they didn't have much longer before slaughter anyhow. I'd let her be. 

A week later, I was out in California for a conference and some visits with our customers. It was a beautiful, sunny day in Oakland. It was my birthday. I was celebrating by joining one of our sales team as he called on local veterinary practices. I got a call on my phone about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. 

"Your f*@#ing pig is dead."

It was my Bride. She was not her normal chipper self. 

It was raining in Maine. And cold. And dark. And there was a dead, 225 lb pig in the yard. 

"How do the other pigs look?"

"They're fine. But There. Is. A. Dead. Pig." 

"I suppose we should move it out of the pen before the other pigs get to it." 

"You move it. I did NOT sign up for this. I'm f*#@ing done with f#@$ing pigs."

You people have only met the lovely, sweet, friendly woman that I married. My Bride is patient, and kind, and beautiful. And she can swear a blue streak when she encounters a large dead animal in her backyard.  I'm standing in the sunny parking lot of a small animal vet practice on the opposite coast. I wasn't in the best position to be much help.  If we were still in Massachusetts, we had enough friends with animals and a sense of humor that I could call on to help. But we had been in our new Maine house for exactly two weeks. We had met pretty much no one. 

Except. 

I did know a guy. 

"I will handle it, my love."

In my first couple of weeks at work, I had shared some stories with my colleagues. Including the whole pig/ham/bacon hobby. One guy on my team ALSO raised pigs. AND he lived in our town. 

It was a little awkward, but on the off chance he might be around, I called him. 

"Hey, Ken - aren't you in California?"

"I am. But I need a huge favor." 

I explained. I felt like I was calling The Cleaner on Pulp Fiction. 

"I'll be over in 15 minutes." 

They moved the pig out of the pen and rolled it in a tarp. I sat in the airport later on, Googling "How deep do I need to bury a dead pig?"

I am pretty sure I'm on a new list someplace now. 

Turns out, the answer is "under 4 feet of soil, and not near your drinking water." 

I'm still not sure what killed the Spare. Pigs are susceptible to pneumonia and a host of other diseases, just like any livestock. But Rocky & Tocino were both perfectly fine. It wasn't contagious. Some livestock get cancer. Or something lodged in their system that keeps them from eating. She had sat in the tarp for two days waiting for me to get home, and I wasn't really prepared to do a necroscopy to figure out what might have happened. And not knowing what took her down, we weren't going to eat her. We just chalked it up to lessons in owning livestock, and kept an eye on the other two. 

And, ok, probably naming her 'The Spare' wasn't the best karma. 

Joe and his partner Joanne came back this past weekend with their trailer. They had kindly agreed to help transport the (remaining) pigs to slaughter. Joanne quickly took charge. "Joe - stand behind the pigs and push them up where I can guide them into the trailer.  Ken - stand over there. No. Over there. More out of the way."  I held the gate so it didn't fall over. And I did it gladly.  I knew when I was in the presence of an expert. 

Tocino went more or less right in. Rocky was being his normal stubborn self. He grunted a lot. He squealed some.  Joanne stood there and let him catch his breath. Then she reached over and grabbed his front legs and hoisted him into the trailer. 

"Hey, Giuia! Come check out what Joanne just did!"

I found that funnier than my Bride did. 

Giving thanks

On this day, I have so many things to be thankful for. Gainful employment. Health. Warmth. Family. Friendship. Love. 

My pigs, on the other hand, are pretty pissed about this whole snow thing, and are demanding more peanuts. And when I had to shovel out a path to the pond, break the ice to fill buckets with water and haul cold, slushy ice-water back up to their pen, I was thankful they only have a few days before they are ready for my freezer. Ha! Take that, farming! 

This is the house that made us lose our minds

When I first got the call from what would become my company, I told my Bride, "I'm going to take the interview. But just to be nice. I'm pretty sure that nobody actually lives in Maine, other than a few stray Canadians and uncountable moose."

I had one conversation. And that led to another. And a third. Soon, I was having conversations with them along the lines of, "Look. I like you. And I like the people I've met. And the role sounds cool. But I don't know anything about Maine other than this is where people go to get a good lobster roll. I mean, I read We Took To The Woods a couple of years ago and I enjoyed it.  But I'm pretty sure that's not the book that'll convince my family."

"Come on up. Bring the family. We'll sort you out and you can check out some schools and neighborhoods." 

We've done this before, a couple of times, the last time, moving from England to Massachusetts. This time, the kids were old enough to be aware & kept in the loop. We gave the realtor a couple of basic parameters. 

1. Don't show us anything less than 100 years old. 
2. We prefer something with 2 or more acres. 

That's pretty much it. We started getting the listings. And running the searches ourselves. And prepping a list. 

I found this one listing that I kept coming back to. It wasn't on the realtor's list. The pictures caught my eye, and the description was just... odd. 

"1780's farmhouse. Greek Revival," it said. That part I liked. 

"Greenhouse and mature, formal garden," it said. Also in the 'win' column. 

"Period details, fireplaces & a lovely front room library," it said. Yes, yes and hell yes. 

"11 bedrooms, plus apartment," it said. Well, I suppo--  wait. What? 

I google-snooped it. Is that a parking lot?

That's a parking lot. 

What the hell is this house? I had to see it. I began lobbying my Bride. She was unconvinced. I asked the realtor about it. "It's been on the market for more than a year, and I've never shown that house before, if that tells you anything." 

But this was the lead photo. Seriously. I had to go see it. 

I had my bets on what the house was. I figured bed-and-breakfast. The listing photos showed the house staged with plenty of antiques and custom pieces. This house ended up being the first one we saw in our tour of Portland-area properties. 

It was gorgeous. My bride and I wandered around the 6+ acres, looking at sculpture and old outbuildings (there are 5), and kept speculating as to what the heck this house was. 

Sculpture in the sitting garden

"It used to be a fraternity house." We were just down the road from the University of Southern Maine. 

"For the last 30 years, the couple that owns it has been renting out rooms to students. The couple works at the university's art department, and host gallery showings here."  Hence the sculpture. And the fact that the home had been cut up into so many individual spaces. There was a 1 bedroom apartment on the second floor, and a number of individual rooms sharing another, separate mini-kitchen. And an in-law style apartment above the barn. 

We didn't care. We turned the corner and saw the giant chestnut tree in full bloom. I've always wanted a chestnut tree. My Bride knows this about me. She knew the house had me.  Then we walked to the back, of the house, down a ways from the cutting garden, a few steps past the three-season sun room, and saw the sunken, secret fern-lined garden in the foundations of the old barn. And I knew the house had my Bride. We ducked behind a stone gate (seriously, you guys. A stone gate!) and looked at each other, whispering urgently. "Holy shit. I love this house." And then we had to do that jinx-owe-you-a-coke because we said it at the same time. 

The side path

We looked at several other houses, but we kept coming back to this one. It spoke to us. It said "buy us."

So we had it inspected. Because we're not complete idiots. 

"It's not square." It's an old house. I expected that. 

"The student apartments are sub-par." That's ok. In our heads, we've already ripped all that out and returned it to a single family home. 

"There are old marks of fire on some of the rafters." Well, it was a frat house at one point, so I suppose that's sort of understandable...

"I don't think the chimneys have been cleaned in the last century. Many of them need to be rebuilt from scratch." Ouch. 

The kitchen was built for a hobbit, with low ceilings and an oddly cut up layout. There is a hot tub in the bathroom on the first floor. A full-sized, honest-to-goodness 8 person hottub. INSIDE. And the house overall had not made it unscathed through the wallpaper-years. Oh, the wallpaper. It is plentiful and abundant in our new house. And none of it matches. Except for being mostly in the "Large and Flowery" category. 

Hobbit kitchen

See that lamp in the middle of the kitchen counter? That's so you can see into the sink. Because it's that dark in the kitchen. And yet somehow? There are 4 different light switches in the kitchen, each of which operate a different set of lights. 5 if you count the under-the-cabinet fluorescent. 

It was all character. The house had a name - it was owned and substantially renovated by Isaac Dyer, a prominent local attorney in the 1820's or so. It was his estate. The house has its own facebook page. It has a personality and a presence. A little 'quirkiness' is to be expected, I suppose. 

All of this got fed into the negotiations. And we knocked the price down to something we could be comfortable with, knowing we were going to start a pretty hefty renovation & update. 

We finally moved into the house about six weeks ago, and started exploring every detail. There were two rooms that we had never actually seen in person (they were student occupied when we walked through the first time). We had visited with the sellers a couple of times to share stories and sit on the front porch with a cup of coffee, but we had been negotiating through proxy, sending our inspectors back through, but never actually having walked the the whole house again. Does that sound insane? That's because it is.  Did you see the part about the INSIDE giant hot tub that we had already chosen to overlook? Besides. The sellers had let me move my pigs in a week or more before the actual close date. We had a trust thing going. 

We got moved in, and started separating the boxes we absolutely had to open (underwear) from those we didn't (paintings). We didn't really want to unpack anything that would be in the way of the renovation. Two of the rooms and one of the outbuildings became big storage lockers. And the answer to every question about where something is ends with "...it's in a box."

We started figuring out what needed to be fixed. There's a hallway light fixture that the sellers had asked to take with them. "Sure," I said. I can replace that, I figured. So a few days after we moved in, I ordered a light fixture I liked, switched off all the switches in the area, and pulled out a ladder to hook it up. (Unlike the kitchen, most of the house has high ceilings. What's up with the kitchen? I have no idea. I'll let you know when we rip apart the room to figure it out). 

The light came on. That was good. But I had switched every switch to 'off' that I could find. I climbed down from the ladder and searched for another switch for an hour before giving up. I finally called the seller and asked him. "Oh. That's a live circuit. I had the light on a pull chain." 

Oh good. That's a fun little surprise that I'm glad I managed to avoid finding out the hard way while I was installing the light. 

Remember: this is fun. Right my love?

Much of the renovation we're going to hire done. We've found a Maine-based contractor team that specializes in antique homes - they've already started on the barn/in-law apartment to give us a place to stay during the peak of the renovation crazy. But some of it we'll be taking on ourselves. The fun parts that we enjoy. Either way, I'm sure I'll end up with a few stories to tell. 

We like Maine. We like the area, the company I've joined, the people we've met, the schools the kids are in. We like the pace & the interactions. We miss our friends in Massachusetts. But when I talk about having pigs in my backyard, Maine folk either nod as if that's totally normal, or shrug as if to say "Ay-yuh. Well. That's a thing some people do."

But mostly, I moved the whole family to Maine so I could finally justify buying a pair of overalls. 

Et voila.

Note the Giant & Flowery wallpaper.