My Love of Storytelling

I believe in the importance of storytelling, it’s something that humans have been engaged in for such an incredibly long time.  Stories help us to understand the past and envision the future. They can offer us hope, spread messages of love, and rekindle hidden threads of remembrance for what it means to be a human culture worth descending from.

Personally, I love storytelling.  I love writing about our lives here and the many incredible teachings that this life of farming and homesteading continue to show me.  I have been gifted with tremendous privilege to be able to live here; to rewyld my heart and soul, immersed within this magnificent forest along the healing waters of the spring-fed brook.  And as we fumble our way through re-membering our ancestral ways of living, since those stories, recipes, crafts, and songs are mostly long forgotten, yet never lost, we have been able to reconnect with something so deep and ancient; the beauty of a handmade life.  A simple, place-based existence that is available to us all in so many different ways.  

Living deeply connected to a place doesn’t have to look like our life though; living off-grid on 74 acres in the woods with perhaps too many goats and too small a budget.  (Kidding, you can never have enough goats - just don’t tell Will I said that.) A place-based life could look like growing some vegetables in a community garden with your neighbours.  It could be knitting a pair of socks from locally spun wool and relishing in the beauty of what you created with your own two hands.  Or perhaps you pour your love into cooking a meal from the food that you grew in your garden and invite your friends and neighbours over for a communal meal.  There’s such beauty and power in these simple acts.  Working with our hands to create offerings with the abundance around us is an act that feeds the Holy.  We must give back to life so that we don’t just suck the teets of our Earth mother dry, which is what the elite seem so intent on achieving at break-neck speed.

A way that I personally feel called to create beauty is through the telling of stories.  My resistance to the capitalist story of consumption and greed by finding wonder in the simple offering of words.  It may seem like a small act to write, and in so many ways, it is.  I do not expect to save the world or to save us from ourselves; yet it feels like I have an obligation to share in this way.  To allow the gifts that I was born with to flow through me.  To be the conduit for my soul’s purpose.  We each have that; our own unique gifts to share with the world, which is why we came into existence right at this exact moment in time and it’s these gifts that the world so desperately needs from us right now.  

Seeing as I love telling stories, I thought that I’d share a story from the beginning of our farming endeavours that was one of the more significant introductions to farming for me, and to life really.  Here’s a story from 2019 about one of our pigs named SuzieQ and her first litter of piglets.  I would also refer to this story as my baptism into the world of farming.

Miss SuzieQ, the sweetest of pigs.

We began our pig raising journey with a few different heritage breed pigs: Mangalitsa, Berkshire, and Guinea Hogs.  Neither of us had ever raised pigs before so it was a totally new experience.  We purchased a boar (intact male pig) named Wooly Angus, to share with another homesteading couple, so that we could breed our pigs.  Well, Angus was obviously successful at his task as our Guinea Hog gilt (an unbred female pig) named SuzieQ became pregnant.  And how did we know this you may ask?  Well, her belly became larger and her teets started protruding.  After researching as much as I possibly could about what to expect and what to watch for, there came a day when I went out to check on SuzieQ only to find that she had completely buried herself under a nest of hay.  Signs to watch for when they're close to birthing #1: nesting behaviour.  Well, check that one off the list.  She had made the best and only pig nest that I'd ever seen! Her teets also began to really protrude and her udder started to fill.  All signs leading to babies.

Well, not long after these signs presented themselves we greeted by ten healthy black piglets.  And oh my goodness were they cute!  We didn’t expect ten piglets though because she only had ten teets and usually on their first farrowing (farm speak for when a pig gives birth) they don’t fill their entire dance card.  But SusieQ was up for the challenge and she turned out to be such a wonderful mom!  

SuzieQ and I had a lovely relationship and since she fully trusted me, she’d let me get very close to her babies without freaking out about it.  Unfortunately, her piglets, for as cute as they looked, wanted nothing to do with my desire to cuddle them.  Such a waste of some really good cuddling potential!  So it was more of a looky-looky no touchy kind of a vibe.  

All of the piglets were growing well and momma was rocking it.  It was wonderful to be able to watch them play and nurse and just be happy little piggies. They were about 5 weeks old when I noticed one of the piglets looked a little bloated and just wasn’t as energetic as usual.  So I did some research on what might cause such a young piglet to be bloated and some of the potential causes could be overeating, illness, twisted gut, constipation...there were a lot of possibilities! And, one of the very, very, very rare, yet possible scenarios could be that

he was born without an anus. 

Yup, that’s a thing.  Or not a thing, I suppose.

I went back outside and had Will hold him while I surveyed the scene.  Lo and fucking behold, this wee piglet did indeed NOT have any sign of an anus of any sort!  No exit hole to speak of. And in case you didn’t catch what I wrote earlier,  he was 5 weeks old at this point.  So this little darling had somehow made it through five weeks of life without ever taking a shit.  I’ve no idea, to this day, how that’s even possible, yet it obviously is.  And at this point, his little body was starting to react to the lack of an anus, meaning that he was beginning to throw up what should have been coming out the backside. Oh my darling.

Our hearts sank as we knew that there was nothing that we could do for him.  There was no way to remedy that situation.

So we made arrangements for a friend to come over with a gun in the morning so we could end the little piglets suffering.  This wasn’t an easy decision, yet we knew that death was his fate, sooner than later, and we felt that it would be better this way as he was beginning to suffer.  We decided to leave him in with his momma and siblings for the night so he could spend one last night with them.  

This experience was one of many here at the farm where I have been able to be fully immersed in both life and death. Where I have been offered an opportunity to question what the dominant narrative has told me and feel into other possibilities.   One of the stories that I’ve been unpacking is the dominant culture’s view of suffering and the need to avoid suffering at all costs.  But just because a being is dying, doesn’t always mean that there is suffering involved and that it’s somehow always our duty to “put them out of their misery” as the saying goes.  Sometimes an animal merely wants to be held and loved in their dying process, and other times, that being has communicated that they want our help with expediting their death or we just know that it’s the right thing to do in the moment.  If we are merely able to stop and listen and take a few deep breaths, all of the guidance and wisdom that we need is waiting right there for us.  We will know what to do.  And suffering, as I am learning, is also just a natural part of life.  Not good, not bad.  It just is.

So back to SuzieQ's piglet...after leaving him with his momma and siblings for the night, we tucked into bed knowing that the next day was going to be difficult, yet it was also what we have signed up for in choosing to embody such a deep and intimate relationship with our food, with life, and with death.  I didn’t sleep very well that night, as you could well imagine, and found myself getting up early the next morning to go and check on our sick little piglet.  As it was wintertime, I bundled myself up in my insulated farming onesie and headed out to the pig hut in the dark.  As I got closer to their hut, I could hear a sound but wasn’t sure what I was hearing.  I had my headlamp on so that I could see and once I got close enough to make out what was happening it became clear that the sound that I was hearing was that of SuzieQ chewing.  Now pigs aren’t the same as goats and cattle, they don’t chew their cud and I hadn’t fed her yet so she wouldn’t have had any food to be munching on.  

This next bit, in case you are picking up any tones of foreshadowing, is the part that I was referring to as my baptism into farming.  

Getting right close to SuzieQ I quickly discovered that what she was so intently chomping on was none other than the remaining facial skin of her sick piglet, now obviously dead and gone after having been eaten by her.  Yup.  That happened.  Not only can a piglet be born without an anus, his mom can also eat him. I just about threw up right then and there.  Seeing something like that was way out of my limited, obviously incredibly sheltered, life experience of both farming and wild nature. 

In my shock and grief, I took the flap of skin from her and began walking back to the house wailing and holding the remainder of this baby in my hands with the feeling of an intense need to barf chomping on my heels.  I got inside and shared with Will what had happened, who by this point was up and could hear my wailing as I got closer to the house.  A real what the fuck kind of a moment in our short farming existence.  

Since we weren’t there to see it happen, we had no idea if the piglet died during the night and then SuzieQ ate him, or if she killed him, knowing his fate just as we did.  SuzieQ was a tremendous mother, so I trust that whatever happened didn’t come from a place of malice.  My deep sense is that he died that night and she, being the still wild creature that she was regardless of her ancestral lines of domestication, knew that there was food to be had there.  Or, perhaps as a safety precaution for her remaining babes she didn’t want to have a dead carcass around that would draw in other hungry souls.  Either way, his fate was going to be the same by our hands that morning; however, we would have skipped the facial skin eating step. Gulp.   

Irregardless, (an inside grammatical error joke with my late Momma Bear) it was an intense experience, and even writing this seven years later, my face still gets all scrunched up in a look of eeew and I can feel my stomach turning.  Yet that’s life.  That’s a part of nature and although it can be challenging not to judge, SuzieQ wasn’t the first sow to eat one of her piglets…although no sow of ours ever killed their piglets on purpose as I have heard of on other farms, yet if one got squished throughout the night as new moms and new babes don’t always know how to communicate to move when their big momma is going to lay down, there would be one less piglet in the morning.  

At first, the reality of sows eating their piglets was very hard for me to comprehend.  Well, honestly, at first I just couldn’t figure out how the fuck a piglet went from being there the night before to then being nowhere to be seen the next morning!  I would search and search and search through the deep hay bedding thinking for sure that I’d find a body only to come up empty handed.  And then I finally spotted it, some blood along the wall boards and my stomach dropped.  Yet over time, I came to understand better and although I wouldn't have chosen that outcome for any piglet, I knew that it wasn’t realistic for me to stand in their pen 24/7 ensuring that no piglet was harmed.  I mean, I tried that at first, yet I could only hold out for so long in the cold winter temps and the mommas were very patient with me, yet they had a line that I was beginning to cross.  So I just had to let go and trust that what happened was meant to happen and that they would all work it out on their own.

This has been one of the greatest teachings, knowing when to intervene and when to let go. Knowing that I can't save them all and that my role is to do my best and then trust in the rest. To know that there is a natural order to life and that some piglets, just like some people, weren't meant to be in this world for very long. It doesn't mean that their lives didn't have value or that they didn't live a completely full life. It just means that the length of their life was shorter than some, yet perhaps fuller than most.

Well, that concludes my storytelling for today.  Stay tuned for another story when I share with you the other time that SuzieQ had a piglet born without an anus after having a conjugal unplanned run-in with her escapee brother from the very same mother on our new series called “All My In-Bred Children” airing exclusively here at Twisted Roots Farm.