NEW PET AND A SPLIT-UP
"Helen! Helen!" Anabel screamed from the bathroom. "Come quick! It's a pig! You got a pig!" "No, I didn't," Helen called back, still unwrapping a stocking stuffer. She sounded just slightly disappointed. "I got a tiger." Eight-year-old Helen, her nine-year-old twin sisters, Anabel and Eliza, and her two-year-old brother, Angus, had gotten nearly life-size stuffed animals for Christmas. "Helen! This is a real one." At that, the rest of us ran to the bathroom. There, huddled in the farthest corner of the shower, quivered an eight-week-old piglet with a bright red ribbon tied around his neck.
"Santa finally brought me a pig! I knew he would," Helen yelled, edging ever so slightly away (Helen has been animal-phobic ever since a German shepherd knocked her over at age two). The pig chose that moment to sprint past our outstretched arms, out of the crowded bathroom, headed for the Christmas tree in the living room.
He raced around and around it as if searching for the earth it should have been growing in. As we quietly sat on the floor, the fuzzy little thing sniffed and snorted his way to each of us. He made a few tight circles, just like a dog, and then collapsed on the floor with a loud sigh -- his skinny legs stretched fore and aft.
"What are you gonna call him?" Eliza asked.
Helen looked at the pig for a moment, reached out a tentative hand, and as she gently touched his back for the first time, answered, "Treader."
My wife, Lisa, and I smiled at each other for what seemed like the first time in nearly a year.
We're not sure how Helen's obsession started, whether it was from reading Charlotte's Web at too young an age, watching Babe on the VCR night after night or an especially poignant moment at the county fair, but on her fourth Christmas, lip quivering, Helen sat on Santa's lap down at the boatyard in Rockport Harbor (Santa always visits mid-coast Maine by boat) and announced what she truly wanted.
"Ho, ho, ho," Santa replied, "and do you want a stuffed one or one of those new electronic ones?"
Helen stared up at him like he'd lost his mind. "I want a real pig," she said, "a really real one."
For four years Helen kept asking. She even petitioned the Easter Bunny, who, to his credit, never gave in. As a result, she received toy pigs, pig candy, pig clocks, even pig costumes, but never the real thing.
Meanwhile, her chances grew slimmer and slimmer without her having a clue. Thanks to my desire for built-in bookcases and top-notch replacement windows in our 1845 Maine farmhouse, we had renovated ourselves beyond our means. The ensuing debt, coupled with everything else that can stress a relationship, drove my wife and me apart.
In the early summer of 2005, after 13 years together, we decided to split up and to sell our house. I took an apartment in town, and Lisa rented a small house that not only banned farm animals but even the family dog.
A HAPPY FAMILY AGAIN
Our separation was tough on us all and tentative from the start. I was over at Lisa's house nearly every day, and we did something as a family at least once a week. Although we remained friends through the ongoing arguments about money and emotional slights, getting back together did not seem to be an option. This was clear to everybody: Lisa, our children, and me.
Even so, Helen didn't give up. She asked for a pig again over the summer for her birthday, although we had nowhere for it to live. And then this past fall, when it came time to write a letter to Santa, this is what she wrote: "Dear Santa, I don't really want anything for Christmas this year, except for a pig. Otherwise, you can bring me whatever you want. Love, Helen."
Good luck, kid.
Santa, clearly knowing better than Helen's parents, delivered Treader on Christmas Eve 2005. Helen was ecstatic, and Treader fit right in, tearing into more Christmas candy than all the kids put together. And something even more unexpected happened. I decided I wanted to get back together with Lisa.
"So I guess we'll have to get a place that has at least two acres. I think that's the code for farm animals," I said while cleaning up the third pile of Treader poop in less than an hour.
"We?" Lisa repeated with the barest hint of a smile.
"Well, yeah. Who else is going to clean out his shed? Helen? We can't even get her to make her bed."
Treader went to Christmas dinner with us, and when he fell asleep beside our friends' woodstove, we knew Santa had done the right thing. The only problem was that Treader had to go back to his momma because of our living situations -- and because he wasn't weaned.
In truth, once Treader was safely back at his birthplace, I was hoping Helen might have had enough. Instead, she went to full-court press, insisting we visit Treader every week. And every day, the second she was off the school bus, she'd ask, "When are we gonna get a home for Treader?"
Within a month, Lisa and I made an offer together on a new place. It was much less expensive than the previous home, but it sits on 2.3 acres, plenty of room for Treader, who finally came to live with us this past spring.
Now, let's just say it's never a good idea to bring home a pig before you've built a pen, especially if you decide to move him from the back of the capped pickup truck, where he was perfectly content, to the three-foot-high trailer where the open air and freedom were just too enticing. He will escape. And you will end up running through briars, mucking through bogs and swatting past mosquitoes for hours on end. When that happens, no matter what you do, don't pick him up around the belly. Pigs really don't like that.
What pigs do like is a child's unconditional love. And a happy family that will take them for walks, scratch their belly and put away the trash can before they get in the house. Pigs are scary fast.
From Reader's Digest - October 2006
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