The Honest Courtesan

Sometimes one little thing will set off a chain reaction that ends up someplace very unexpected.  In this case, it was my neighbors across the lane getting three sows to raise for meat, and one or all of them going into heat a few weeks ago.  That of course caught Cicero’s attention, and since then he’s been going over there to hang around outside of their pigpen until I go to get him.  The neighbors say they don’t mind because he’s harmless, but my two options are A) annoy them every day asking permission to fetch him; or B) go into their yard every day (even though I have their permission).  Obviously, this is not a sustainable situation, so I decided to beef up my fencing so Cicero can’t simply go under it; besides, the north and east fences had grown slack and weren’t keeping Shiloh in either.  This is due in part to a bad windstorm we had about three years ago which dropped quite a few trees, three or four of them directly onto the fence.  I extended the fence on both sides about 6 meters (to the treeline on the north and several meters into it on the east), then I gathered all the fallen branches and tree trunks in the area and piled them up along the fence, tangling them together to make it extremely difficult for a small but determined pig to push them through.  To aid the process, I borrowed Jae’s little electric chainsaw, and was astonished at how easily it ripped though tree trunks not much less in diameter than the length of the blade!  So naturally, I decided I needed one like it, only bigger; as powerful as hers is for such a little thing, it just can’t handle several of the ones I need to clear.  And while I already have a gas-powered chainsaw, I simply don’t have the upper body strength to start it and there isn’t always a man around when you need one to do something like cut down a tree.  So anyway, Grace picked out the one she think best suits our needs, and I added it to my Amazon wishlist.  And in the meantime, I’m going to be beefing up the fences out front with welded wire fencing and leftover sheet metal, so that our pig can wander about safely in the paddock without being lured across the lane by a trio of hussies more than twice his size.