The Birthday Pig

Newsletter 2024-09-12

We had a very important birthday in my house this week. Gilly turned eight. Her age was a matter of debate leading up to the big day. Most of us couldn’t remember what year we got her. My ten-year-old, Lucy, reminded us. These days, she’s the chief swineherd here. I’m sorry if that term sounds derogatory. Let’s call her the senior porcine engineer. I should have known better than to question her judgment. I looked up Gilly’s commemorative birth certificate (yes, that’s a thing), and, sure enough, Lucy was right. If Gilly were a human, she’d be in third grade right now. If she were a farm pig, she would have been bacon seven years ago. How lucky for all of us that she’s been here rather than anywhere else in the world. It’s been a delightful era, all the stories I tell about pig disasters notwithstanding.

It’s somewhat defensible that I forgot how old Gilly is. I barely remember my own age. The math gets more complicated every year, which is how I ended up being thirty-seven twice in a row. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to aging backwards. Gilly is out of milestones. She’s been her current size since she was two or three. Even people in the comment section who used to gasp with voyeuristic delight at her dimensions have gotten used to her. My potbelly pig is the size of a normal potbelly pig. After a while, the internet gets bored with being fake scandalized. Gilly isn’t looking forward to any other age-based achievements. It’s not like she can get her driver’s license. Although, even without thumbs, she can’t be worse than half the drivers I see on the road. She just sort of exists, a permanent fixture in our house, getting neither better nor worse. She’s not learning new tricks, but she’s not causing new problems, either. She’s achieved a delightful, unchanging level of stasis. If only my children could also learn to never grow up.

Most of our pig emergencies are in the past. Pig proofing our house was a lot like toddler proofing it. When our oldest daughter first became mobile, Lola and I watched what she hurt herself with and took those things away. Scars equal learning. Gradually, we transformed our house into a series of padded rooms where it was all but impossible to cause injury to yourself or others. Of course our youngest daughter, Waffle, found a way. Most of her destruction was directed against property. She’ll be twenty before I unhide the permanent markers. We went through the same process with the pigs. Gilly discovered what she could get into, and we adjusted accordingly. That’s why the bottom drawer on our island still doesn’t have a handle on it. We removed it when she figured out she could pull it open to steal entire loaves of bread. We haven’t kept bread in that drawer in years, yet we never reattached the handle. It’s not even on our list of someday projects. Until I started writing this paragraph, I’d forgotten that I’d removed it. It’s hard to remember that, in other people’s houses, the kitchen isn’t randomly missing fixtures to thwart overly curious indoor livestock. Those people need to up the excitement level in their lives.