Write On!

              " Mommy Mommy!" called the eldest, They're not girls, they are boys."
" O no," said I, without a thought or concern. ' They are girls."
" O no!... They are not," said Anne.
" Boy pigs have tits too:" I responded from my kitchen table, where the
bread had risen and I was busily punching down the dough. I had remembered
the old adage ' AS USELESS AS TITS ON A BOAR.'
Then," said the eldest, " what's that?" She was pointing out the
window to a little piglet running about the yard with an obvious appendage
beneath its belly...
" Must be their belly button," said I in my ignorance concerning pig
anatomy, and thinking how at times the calves developed enlarged navels.
" Mommy," said the six year old, " Do you pee through your belly
button?"
That got my attention. Leaving the dough and wiping my hands, I
followed her out to the barn yard to give our purchase closer inspection.
Sure enough, that little pig was indeed male, or had experienced a
rapid sex change overnight. We decided to give each of the others a closer
inspection, and what did we discover? They were all males. What a joke! The
neighbours must be choking on their tea, to think they had pulled off such a
stunt.
It was perhaps a good thing we had no telephone, and that the ride
upstream was too long and too hazardous to make a return trip. As Gene was
leaving, we decided it was easier to raise the boars and eat them rather than
having too many sows around. Besides, it was obvious that Petunia would
brook no usurpers in her kingdom. It was also obvious that our lack of
knowledge and experience was a further detriment to this idea of expansion.
So we fed the runty little things. And we fed them and fed them.
Finally we decided they were too old or too genetically disadvantaged to gain
the weight advantage Petunia had shown. We butchered them one by one to
supplement our wild game, rabbit and fish diet. Tasted pretty good too.
We thought it a good April Fools joke that the neighbour had played
and forgot about it, except to be duly embarrassed by thinking boars were
sows, even for a short length of time.
What we had not anticipated, was the neighbours reaction the next
time we met on the trail. They must have thought we would retaliate in some
violent manner, for they wheeled their horses about and took off in the opposite
direction rather abruptly. I guess they learned of our amusement from other
folk, because the next time our paths crossed they visited civilly enough,
although the subject of pigs was not addressed.