I was reading Ruth’s post about going veggie and had to giggle.  It only occurred to me once to go vegetarian.

When I was really little I spent my days with my grandmother on the family farm while everyone else went off to work.  It was a small family farm but we did have beef cattle and pigs and a large vegetable garden.  I can even remember a bit about how the garden was laid out…strawberries to the front, dill along the fence line, root vegetables toward the back of the smoke house…

My grandmother took care of the pigs. She fed them and if they needed any kind of nursing care she did that too.  One year my grandmother’s pigs had a litter of babies and as usual she was always in among them, checking on them and caring for them.

Now, while most people believe pigs to be really smart, like dogs, I have a different idea.  They are more like your most loyal golden retriever-they really sweet and eager to please.

The sow that had this particular litter was really stupid and stepped on a bunch of her babies…not good when you are about as squishy soft as a plum and smaller than the foot doing the stepping.  So she mushed a bunch of her babies and my grandmother tried to save as many as she could.  My grandmother had to sew one up because it was cut so badly.

She kept the piglet inside and we got to play with it and bottle feed it—way too cute!

So fast forward to a dinner almost a year and a half later…My grandmother fixed a lovely ham dinner from one of the hams in the smoke house…a ham with a scar through it.

That was the only time in my life that I swore I was never eating meat again!