Pig tails and happy pigs

This charming fellow now has pride of place on top of my computer speaker. He's some pig.

I've been trying to upload photos from my trip to Canada and the US, and to organize them, but I had to pause long enough to photograph my new pig. He is a present from my sister Mary, who remembered that in the early weeks of this blog, in December 2005, I wrote about pigs a couple times. So here is my new good luck happy pig, a blogs mascot to keep me company while I write. I'm going to call him O-Ink.

Mary introduced me to the charm of pigs, although she now shudders at the thought. She was a college student doing biology and I was a little girl. She had to dissect a poor piglet, not something she was enthusiastic about, but she gave me the tail, which I thought was the cutest thing I had ever seen, and I wrapped it around the base of my bedside lamp, where it kept its curl nicely, until my mother discovered it. Out went the tail, but I was left with the impression of an animal so naturally cheerful that its tail curled. Mary, meanwhile, accidentally left the rest of the pig in a brown paper grocery bag at the back of a bus one day.

One of my favorite books became Charlotte's Web, by EB White, and if you somehow reached adulthood without reading, rush to make up for your loss. It is possibly my alltime favorite book.

Every time I look over at my pig now, I smile. O-Ink!