June 25, 2015  Freewriting 4.1

As I sit her at the computer overwhelmed by all the writing projects ahead of me, I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to get it all accomplished. I have no ideas what to write about that would be interesting. And all of a sudden as my mind so often does, it goes completely off track and I’m thinking about something on the farm when I was a kid. 
Someone gave us a baby pot belly pig. My mom was raising Australian Shepherds for farm and rodeo dogs at the time and this little pig quickly decided he was one of the dogs. He lived down by the dogs, he ate with the dogs, he tried to do everything the dogs did, he followed all of us around like a dog…so we named him Dog. He was such a character. He reminded us a lot of that pig on that show Green Acres. But as he grew he started getting into more mischief. He would turn over the feed barrel and help himself to the dog food, he learned to open the puppy cages and crawl in with the puppies that were being weaned, but he was getting too big for that. Still we loved our Dog. We were heart broken when Mom told us he was going to have to go. We begged for her to let us keep Dog, but she said he was causing too many problems and she was afraid that he would wind up hurting one of the puppies, even though it would not be intentional. However, with all of our pleading she did agree to try and find him a good home. And she did. We had neighbors down the road who had had a couple of potbelly pigs for several years, and they agreed to take Dog to give theirs company. So we loaded him up and took him down there. The next day much to our surprise, he was back home. So we loaded him up again and took him back down to the neighbors. This time they took him in the house, made him a bed in the living room.  I guess he must of thought he’d died and gone to piggy heaven, because that was the last time he tried to come home.

Now what all this has to do with getting my assignments done, I don’t have a clue. Why my mind is wondering back to the farm as a kid, I don’t have a clue. Maybe it’s because of the question that was asked about growing up. But it also got me thinking about one of our cats. 

He was a big white tomcat that was given to us as a kitten by the lady at the feed store. Don’t ask me why but his name was Squirrel. Squirrel was one of the coolest cats I ever knew. He loved the dogs, he wasn’t afraid of them at all. He wasn’t strictly a house cat, nor was he strictly an outdoor cat, he came and went as he pleased. You’d find him curled up on the waterbed or you might find him asleep on top of the car, or even in one of the dog pens with one of the dogs. I remember when Mom brought home a big red Aussie that was for my oldest sister’s birthday present. This dog hated cats and I’d seen him chase down any cat that would run from him and in no time that cat was history. The first thing when she brought him home he spied Squirrel and made a running leap at him. We all stood frozen as to what the fate of Squirrel was going to be. But Squirrel, didn’t run. He just stood there and when the dog got to him, he rubbed up against his leg like he would always do us. That dog was so baffled that he jumped back and just stood there looking at that cat. Squirrel walked up to him and rubbed on him again…again he jumped back looking baffled. But he never made another attempt to chase him. As a matter of fact they became the best of friends and that dog protected that cat like he belonged to him. He shared his dog house and if any of the other dogs even thought about hurting Squirrel, it was not a good thing. Now that dog, still, with any other cat would chase it just as hard as he could, and that cat had better hope that he got to a tree or the shop fast enough to find safety. But Squirrel had made a friend for life.

And I still haven’t gotten started on the rest of my lesson….sigh.