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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Archive for August, 2009

Turkeys Dancing

A flock of them, on the blacktop driveway within sight of my office window, hopping and circling and pecking at each other.  With turkey season in the offing it may be time to remove the screen and clear the shooting lane…

Dirt Tracks and Wide Open Spaces

Sparse posting.  Our days busy with real (non-digital) things.  Albert’s funeral Friday.  It was more a ceremony of honor than sadness.  Although when we hit the second verse of “How Great Thou Art”, my sister-in-law had to share her tissues with me.  “…When through the woods and forest glades I wander…“  When grieving I tend to seek trees or open skies.  The finest thing I can say in honor of Albert is that I went home having given great consideration to my role as a father.

And so it was in a related vein that the very same evening I found myself trackside with my nine-year old (wearing earmuffs nearly the size of her own head), reveling in the dirt and noise and those moments when in her excitement she would rat-a-tap my shoulder, pointing excitedly as the car she picked pulled a slingshot off the high-side and moved up a place.  We came home way too late for a little girl, both of us dusted with red grime and having shared an illicit drive-through chocolate malted on our way out of town.  Promised her three things before I left on book tour last spring: fishing, dirt track races and a treehouse.  We’ll frame up that treehouse this week (although on the way home from the races we began discussing the possibility of a small shack on skids so we can scoot it from one favorite forest place to another).

Yesterday Mom went to a wedding-related event so the girls and I went to a fly-in hosted by a friend of ours.  We got to go for a ride in one of these.  The trip included a touchdown on a local lake, at which point the two-year-old said, “I scared.”  But as soon as we left the water and arced back into the air, she resumed pointing out tiny cows.  And as we landed and taxied, she put her mouth to my ear and over the roar of the twin engines, said, “Do it again!”

Fat Albert

A moment to remember Fat Albert, who was actually as skinny as the sandhill cranes that bugled from his cornfields.  I sat in his living room one day while he told me story after story, one of which wound up in Coop.  This man was so good to my family, and in particular my brother Jed.  Albert lived a full and reverent life – 95 years, and didn’t hang up the deer hunting cap until the very last.

Re-Regarding Our Finicky Pigs

Yesterday I Twittered (and Facebooked) that I was boiling apples in order to get the pigs to eat them.  Several folks wondered how much it was costing to boil apples or what kind of fuel I was expending, but we’ve got a lot of scrappy firewood, so fuel’s not a problem (I did do a test boil on the electric stove).  Plus there was a great story in one of the James Herriot vet books about the year Tristan kept a giant cauldron of pig food bubbling out back, so I’m fancying the idea of doing the same.

A lot of folks very kindly suggested all sorts of pig food and/or told me hey, pigs will eat anything.  And there’s yer trouble.  This is our third year of raising pigs (so clearly, I am now an expert), and up until now we had pigs that would eat anything.  I mean, they’d go in stages with some things (liked early nettles, not late nettles; would eat apples but not until they rotted a little) but in general, whatever we threw in there they scarfed down.  But this year’s batch has been finicky from the get-go, not eating lamb’s quarters, or nettles, and not even devouring their bread and goat milk the way I’ve seen in the past.  They dig up potatoes and then just leave them untouched.  The three Hampshires are the pickiest – a friend with pig-raising experience said this is not unusual for that breed, so maybe that’s the deal.  Our one Duroc is definitely eating more and growing faster.  Lately I’m wondering if maybe they’ve got worms.  An old-timer told me that in addition to decreased weight gain, “wormy” pigs sometimes lack appetite.  I don’t think that’s the trouble, though, because I haven’t seen any sign of worms (yep, checked their poop), and when they get things they like (fresh rape leaves, for instance), they mow it right down.

And they eat their ground hog feed.  Maybe I need to pull back on giving them feed so they get hungrier for the free stuff.  But then I wonder if that will cost us some weight gain.  Good thing we’re doing this for ham and bacon and pork chops, not for a living.

Just thinking out loud, basically.  And of course over-thinking things is my favorite sport.  By the end of October, the pigs will either be big or not.

Why I Regularly Invoke My Brother the Logger

…and my father the farmer, and my mother the nurse, and my sister-in-law the dump truck driver, and my brother-in-law the machinist, and my sister the factory worker:

I have never liked to suggest that writing is grinding, let alone brave work. H. L. Mencken used to say that any scribbler who found writing too arduous ought to take a week off to work on an assembly line, where he will discover what work is really like. The old boy, as they say, got that right. To be able to sit home and put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job. The only true grit connected with it ought to arrive when, thinking to complain about how hard it is to write, one is smart enough to shut up and silently grit one’s teeth.

- Joseph Epstein

Radio Today

Interview I did back during COOP tour will re-air today on WUWM’s “Lake Effect” at 10 a.m. and 11 p.m. (CST) today.  I recall I was overtired and spoke mostly about serious rather than comic things.  Show is also archived at the radio website.  To get to this radio station’s studios you go to a mall then descend a fabulous spiral staircase.

Just Another Day

Rain when we woke, gray skies, fed the pigs and chickens several bags of old bread and buns from the bakery outlet because we’re out of feed, so it’s off to the mill today.  Snuck away to the Mississippi yesterday and had a splashing good time with the family and a friend.  Got to ride a boat through the Lock #4, the 9 year-old’s eyes were wide.

But right now the rain, some coffee and poetry (reading “Late Wife”), and then the keyboard.

Author Just Down the Road

Both my nine-year old and my two-year old like Katie McKy books.  They’ve been cycling through bedtime stack regularly lately.

Once on a cold day in Madison I helped Katie carry her stuffed pumpkins.

Sunday Dinner(s)

Finished product(s):

Actually, photo #3, that’s a duck dinner.

Another’s Perspective

Out and about today so I’ll leave the storytelling to someone else…and insider’s look at our recent writing workshop.

Note to Sue K.: Thank you for forwarding this.  I tried replying to your email, but the school email system bounces me as spam.  Perhaps the school email system does not realize I might be Donny Osmond under cover of baldness…