The Five Little Pigs - A new and improved version

The following story was written per request of my mother-in-law. It is a story of work and learning. Because it was written for another audience some of the details may be unnecessary.

When I was ten years old, my family moved from our home in Huson, Montana to live near my grandparents in Star Valley, Wyoming. This was an exciting but sad time in my life. While living in Montana, we loved visiting my grandparents on their dairy farm. We traveled the 14-hour round trip as often as we could to see my grandparents, milk their cows, feed the calves, and be in a beautiful place.  That is why the move to Star Valley was exciting. It was sad because I was leaving behind a home I had lived in for almost my whole life. I had good friends. I was doing well in school. Looking back I can say that even though this change was hard, it was a good change and blessed my life in many ways. One way was learning more about hard work.

Work has always been a consistent part of my life. Every day, every week, and every weekend I knew I would be working. Sometimes the jobs were small like cleaning my room, folding clothes, or scrubbing the toilet, but sometimes the jobs were big like mowing a 1.5 acre lawn or shoveling snow off the driveway. I grew accustomed to work. I learned to love it. When working with my siblings, we would make it fun. Thanks to work, I grew closer to my siblings, became stronger, learned skills, and accomplished much. In spite of all these benefits and the consistency of working often, I didn’t realize that my work ethic could be strengthened and stretched even more.

I remember the first day after we moved to Star Valley. There was a job to do and we were the ones to do it. The irrigation pipes needed to be moved from the edge of the field into the first watering position. The distance was about 40 feet, but the pipes were big and awkward. I could barely move them. It was hard work. I didn’t know if I was cut out for it. Thanks to the culture of work in my family and some older sisters/younger brother that I did not want showing me up, I didn’t give up. I persevered and realized I can do hard things. At least I thought I could until I met those five little pigs.

My family lived in a house surrounded by fields. There were a couple of sheds near the house which were full of hay, broken machines, firewood, old food storage and other odd gadgets and gizmos. When I first moved there I did not anticipate the many uses of sheds. The summer of my eleventh year, I learned a new use for a shed—a pig pen. As a family we bought five little pigs to raise and sell. I was appointed to be the pig whisperer, so I took it upon myself to give food and water to these five pigs every day. It was work. Sometimes it was pretty easy.  I just had to fill up a couple buckets of water at the spigot, carry them to the pen, open the pen without any of them escaping, and dump the buckets into the water trough without spilling too much of it. Then I just had to fill their food trough with some grain and old scraps without getting run over. Those were the easy feedings. Pigs like to eat, so they had to be fed and watered twice a day. There was no day of rest. Monday I fed them. Tuesday I fed them. Wednesday I fed them. Thursday, Friday, Saturday I fed them. Even Sunday I had to feed them. They were worse than the Very Hungry Caterpillar. This routine lasted a few months. In that time they ate a lot of food, they got a lot bigger, and I learned a lot. The day we loaded them into the trailer to take them to the butcher was bittersweet. My responsibilities to them were finished, yet I had those pigs to thank for some very valuable experiences.  I learned many things from those pigs but three stand out—responsibility, problem solving, and courage.

Responsibility is a tricky thing to learn. It can even be harder to teach. One evening after a fun-filled family event, we arrived home after dark. I had not fed the pigs yet. I started inside with the rest of the family when my dad reminded me about the pigs. I wanted to protest. I was tired. They would be fine till morning, right? My dad helped me understand that I agreed to the task. I was responsible for the pigs. These pigs depended on me for food and water. I needed to be there for them. Some may wonder whether giving an eleven-year-old boy five pigs to raise is a reasonable endeavor, but I can say that it will teach him the definition of responsibility much better than a dictionary.  

Pigs are interesting animals. They are smarter than people think. Unlike cows, pigs eat in one place, go to the bathroom in another place, and sleep in another place. Even though they are smart animals, they needed my help to solve some of their problems. They do not have sweat glands to help regulate their body temperature.  When it is hot outside they have to wallow in the mud to help lower their body temperature. Ideally the mud should be in the shade. I needed to give the pigs a place to wallow. One side of the pen was covered by the shed. That gave me the shade I needed. Luckily the floor of the shed was dirt so all I had to do was string a hose over from the spigot and create some mud. I could do that. Another problem that came up was where to get all the food for the pigs. Pigs eat a lot and although our family of twelve had some leftover scraps from preparing all our food, it was not enough to feed five pigs. Sometimes we could go up to the granary by the milk barn and roll some barley for the pigs, but we couldn’t do this all the time because it was far away and the barley was for the cows. Pigs will eat grass and weeds so sometimes we were able to extend their pen to include some fresh greens but that still was not going to be enough. We decided that we would feed the pigs some of the old food storage in the shed. It consisted of hard beans and grains. There were even some very old dried prunes. The food storage was just the ticket to satisfy the pigs hunger and round out their diet. I would sometimes sample the prunes for the pigs. I had to make sure it was alright for them, and besides, I needed energy too.

I might be 15 years old but I still look 11, right?

I developed a lot of courage feeding those pigs. At first when they were little, it wasn’t too bad to enter their pen. I was bigger than them and was able to survive carrying their food and water into them. As they grew, and they grew fast, it was much more difficult and scary to enter the pig pen. I learned to do hard things and overcame my fear of entering the pen. Sometimes when I fed the pigs it was already dark. This could be scary because I knew there were skunks out there. I could also hear the coyotes in the distance. Some nights that distance didn’t seem very far away. Through prayer and working up my courage, I would be able to feed the pigs. I knew I had to be brave, find a solution to the problem, and realize my responsibility. With these valuable principles in hand I knew I could overcome any challenge the pigs gave me.