The misunderstood evil pig who is probably not so evil

I suppose it’s natural when you move into a new house that something surprising may have been left by the previous owners. In my sister’s case, it was a prosthetic leg left in a basement room that only locked things in rather than out. In our case, it was a concrete but eerily lifelike piglet that seemed to appear out of the Clematis bush near the grill. A combination of autumn and heat from the grill caused enough loss of leaves to reveal it a few weeks ago.

Its sudden appearance startled my wife one night when she took the dogs out. She jumped as she thought a third dog had joined them in the yard. I had seen it the night before, but decided to let her find it on her own. Maybe a mistake. I had taken it for Willow, it being about the same size and shape of our dog, and having a remarkable lifelike quality about its posture. Barb didn’t find it as endearing; rather, having been startled by it at twilight, declared it creepy.

Creepy is somewhat synonymous with evil, so the pig was deemed persona non grata, and I was tasked with removing it permanently. This turned out to be more difficult than simply taking it out to the curb. While the size of a medium-sized dog, it still had all the weight of a concrete object. Taking it out with the trash was not really an option. It occurred to me then that the easiest way to rid ourselves of it would be to toss it into the pond. Which I subsequently forgot to do for about a week.

During my third reminder of this shortcoming, which included a detailed and slightly more extensive list of my other shortcomings than my second reminder, I pointed out that the kids would be home for Christmas, and we could make an evening out of it with a campfire on the dock and a pig plunging through the now forming ice on the pond. This was accepted as a reasonable plan. It seemed to work out, too. We had a series of cold days, but on the eve of Christmas Eve, the wind dropped, and the temperature came up to about 30°, making it perfect for a back porch campfire in the Solo Stove.

The long dark of an afternoon sunset, firelight, and a few cocktails led to a vaguely sacrificial parade down to the pond with the 60 LB pig borne on my son’s right shoulder. He gave an impressive heave, gaining a few more vertical feet with the expectation of a satisfying crash through the ice. Forest is about 6 feet tall, and assuming that we were guessing right with the additional height and weight of the pig, by the time it hit the pond, it would have generated about the same force as a small car. But instead of an icy splash, we heard a dull thunk.

The piglet had managed to land on its base, nearly perfectly aligned with the point where the sun had fallen below the horizon, the ice barely fractured in an almost imperceptible ring around it. It gave the impression of having trotted out there by itself to greet the first night of winter.

After the inevitable laughter at the unexpected outcome faded, it occurred to me that our attempt at illegal dumping was now going to be evident to every one of our neighbors up and down the lake. Being new to the neighborhood, I wondered how this would affect our reception to it when people started going outdoors again in the springtime. This concern wasn’t helped by the fact that the pig now appeared much more sympathetic and even began to take on an air of pluckiness as it clung to the rim of ice that slowly melted.

The piglet stared mournfully at the sky for the next 5 days, perhaps knowing it was the last it would see of it. I seriously considered trying to rescue it several times and had to keep reminding myself that it was a piece of concrete. It stayed as long as Forest did, slipping to the bottom sometime during our trip to the airport to drop him off.

Somehow, I’m not entirely ready to say that this is the end of the story.

 

David Ledrick has a wide range of interests and wishes the days were longer so he could pursue them all. He really should get more sleep. He looks for the best version of everyone he meets and is passionate about projects that allow those versions to come out. He would rather share ideas than talk about his job. He has lived in Toledo for 20 years and is still finding new and interesting things in it.