Practically Piggled Patch

Piglet is in the wild black raspberry patch.

I don't know if wild boars usually eat black raspberries, but Piglet doesn't care.  She is more adventurous (and to be honest, also more eclectically greedy) than 'most anybody.  More dexterous, too.  She just tusks a bunch of berries to line up with her snout, then inhales them into position, and chomp!  Sweet mouthful!

Sometimes there is only one ripe berry in a cluster.  No problem!  Piglet just lifts her little cloven hoof, catches up the berry in its "dimple" (her word!) and flicks it onto her ever-ready tongue.

Piglet is really good at playing hide-and-seek with berries.  They hide, and she seeks.  She advances, she retreats.  She holds her head at every possible angle.  She is really good at looking high, (watching cranes is good practice for that!) looking low, and finding that random shy berry hiding behind one of its own three-part leaves.

Of course, as everyone who has ever gone raspberry picking knows, there is a price to pay.  You are going to get scratched.  Even an adolescent pig-hide has its sensitive parts.

But Piglet knows how to deal with those thorns that grab hold and do not want to let go without inflicting bloody damage.  All you have to do is loop-de-loo!  Just reverse your grabbing action and add a zany little flourish to make up for the curvature of the thorn, and you are free.  No scratches!

Admittedly, Piglet might suffer a teeny tiny puncture or two, but who cares?  It's worth it!

She oinks that the berry patch, with no labor on her part but harvesting, produces more yummies than some of those paltry pathetic gardens around the edge of her stomping grounds!

Piglet looks at me with sudden concern.  She isn't talking about my garden, of course.

Do you have a wild raspberry patch near you?  Maybe if you go berry-picking, you'll encounter Piglet.   If you have a "plume" (a turkey feather will do in a pinch) and a piece of very white birch bark handy, she might even give you her autograph!

Grand High Brow Sow

Piglet knows, but doesn't know how she knows, that the Grand High Brow Sow is related to How Now Brown Cow.

This doesn't make any sense at all, because everybody knows that sows are pigs and cows are, well, cows.  Hmm, Piglet figures, maybe it's because they all have cloven hooves. (Editor's note:  Do they?  I'm not so sure!) After all, she also knows a Remote Goat Afloat.  Goats have cloven hooves, too.  Somehow he seems like a more distant relative!

But what about the Grand High Flown Sow?  (Must be Piglet's Fairy Sowmother!)  Is she more closely related to How Now Brown Cow than Grand High Brow Sow?

Piglet shakes her headlet.  This mystery is almost as confusing as Tillie Williams and who she likes and who she doesn't like.  Piglet knows Tillie Williams doesn't like her and Piglet doesn't know why.  As far as Piglet is concerned, Tillie is just silly!

Very, very, profoundilly silly!

But not as silly as, "In the beginning was the word...."

Why, everybody knows that in the beginning was the berry!

Piglet and the Blueberry of Happiness

Piglet is puzzled about the Blueberry of Happiness.

The Blueberry of Happiness is supposed to be in her back yard, she has heard, but Piglet's Territory is more like a maze than a backyard.  And it crisscrosses and hopscotches and dives under and trots over all sorts of other Territories!

How do you locate a backyard in a maze?  Piglet is amazed anyone would even try it.

Piglet figures her backyard is whatever lies behind her at any given moment, but all she sees when she looks backwards that she can rightfully call her own is ham!  (As the farmer calls it.  Piglet blushes resentfully at the implied threat.)

Piglet's only back yard is her nether half!  And how can that equal three feet?  It doesn't make any sense at all.  Piglet doesn't have three feet back there, only two!  The other two are quite obviously right here, in front!

And what is this all-important Blueberry of Happiness that everyone is always on about?  It must be, Piglet figures, a very large blueberry!  One that you can just bury your whole snout in and...

I hate to break into Piglet's revery, but really she must be told that she is under a misapprehension!

"Piglet," I say gently (she hates to be told she is wrong about something), "It's not the Blueberry of Happiness. "It is the Bluebird of Happiness!"  Piglet's jaw drops.  Birds are definitely not her favorite food.  Unless they are very big ones.  Piglet would certainly have to be pretty desperate to try to gulp down a little feathery bony iota like a bluebird!

Piglet squeals, "Well, what good is it if you can't eat it?  Who wants to eat a bluebird, anyway?"

Now it is my turn to drop my jaw, and it's kind of hard to talk with the bottom of your mouth groveling around on the ground.  I am literarily speechless!  (Or something.)  Where did Piglet hear about the Bluebird of Happiness, and how did she get it so wrong?  She must have been eavesdropping on that old Scotsman who farms on the far side of the hazelnut glade!

Well, I have to confess that my own zany history of pursuing the Bluebird of Happiness is no less screwy than hunting for the Blueberry of Happiness!

I'll tell you sometime.

But right now I have to go home and ponder how to tell Piglet about the Bluebird of Happiness, so she can have something else to fret about besides an empty stomach!

After all, we have to deal with Reality here!

Right?

Piglet's Muddle Puddle

Piglet is not happy with her puddle right now.

"Fiddle faddle fuddle!"

It's not even or just that her puddle is muddy.  Piglet has never been a fuddy-duddy.

No, her complaint right now is that her puddle is - everywhere!

She looks around and all is puddle.

Except for where it is a river, and Piglet sure can't tell where the river usually was!

It's a big river now, and what used to be her leafy mattress (the one with milkweed fluff interspersed for extra luxurious softness) is now strudel tossing on a high-water rodeo!

Except for the pitter-patter of rain the flood is silent.

Piglet is making up for it, though, with little squeals of frustration and hardly miniscule snorts of indignation.

"Fiddle faddle flood-dull!  I'm in a muddle!  Don't know where to huddle!"

She's shuttling back and forth, slipping and dripping instead of performing double triple entrechats with a saucy flip of her tail.

Poor Piglet!  She's definitely disgruntled!  (Well, not literally, but then can one ever be literally disgruntled?  I mean - )

"I need a cuddle!"

"Well, I don't know about that," I think, aroused from my definitionally distracted fugue state.

But I will try to find a way to get her up into the loft of that old barn on the hill.  There's enough straw up there to lie down on, and an old quilt.  (Don't ask me how I know!)

If the river gets really high, maybe Piglet can fish out the window grizzly-bear-style by snatching her catch out of the water with her snout!

That could be a super supper!

P.S.

Well, Piglet isn't in the barn.

When I tried to lead her over there, she was not about to follow.

That's right.  I must have forgotten.  Piglet is a wild boar!

She is not about ready to go into a civilized structure like a barn, even if (especially if?) it is my idea!

Well, I admit the fish-catching-out-the-window was a zany-lame supper plan.

But you have to have hope!

And if you can't be comfortable in the moment (whether it is because of your situation or your own stu - er, recalcitrant - stubborness -

Piglet interrupts my revery.  She does happen to know the meaning of those last two words, she huffs.

Well, okay, she knows how to run uphill.

And she does.

Piglet's Peanutty Pathology

The other day I was walking past the edge of the wood where the county fair carnival held sway, and I ran across Piglet eating peanuts.

"I wonder why they threw away the peanuts?" I wondered.  "Elephants like peanuts.  So do monkeys."

Piglet stopped chewing in consternation.  "I like peanuts, too!"  So am I an elephant, or am I a monkey?"

"What?"

Piglet stomped impatiently.  "Am I an elephant or am I a monkey?"

"Piglet, you're a pig!  You know that!"

"But elephants and monkeys like peanuts and I like peanuts, so I must be one of them!"

"Piglet, that's crazy talk.  You and I both like to walk, that doesn't mean we are each other."  (Well, maybe that particular observation wasn't the truest or wisest one to make, so I tried again.)

"Piglet, I like peanuts too.  Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?"

"Well, you're sure no elephant!  But what am I?"

"Piglet, some people don't like that stubborn old donkey down the road.  They also don't like the Devil.  So they say the old donkey is the Devil.

"Just because two creatures have something in common doesn't mean they are the same in all ways, but sometimes people say they are, especially if they don't like them.  It's loony."

"I know that!" Piglet responded indignantly.  "I was talking about peanuts!  I want to know whether I am an elephant or a monkey!  Who said anything about loons!

'Now you have me all confused."

She began to act as if she didn't like peanuts all that much after all.

"Well, Piglet, join the club," I commiserated.

"Do we beat people with it?"

"Huh?  Oh, well, maybe we do - in a way."

I wandered off, in such a meditative daze I was making zany zigzag trails in the fallen leaves.

Piglet didn't follow.  Those peanuts began to look good again, and she was still hungry.

Piglet's PoeTree - Laden with Ravin's

I ran across Piglet the other day holding her turkey-feather quill.

"I'm writing a poem!" she announced:  "Ode to an ode."

"Wonderful!"  I cried, inspired.

"Ode to an Owed.  I'll write one, too!"

Ode to an Owed

If I owe you,

I tow you.

Everywhere I go you

Enter in.

If I owe you,

I "oh!" you.

You become

More important

Than a win,

Or a whim!

No, be not my owed,

Like an odious toad

I have to kiss

To win.

Oh!

I looked up and saw not a prince but Piglet, who had bumped me with irritation.

"What are you gabbling about?"  she demanded.

"I was reciting my Ode to an Owed, Piglet."

"It doesn't make any sense at all," Piglet asserted.  "Besides, I'm holding my pen so you should be calling me by my nom de plume.  (Which I would be happy to do but I honestly can't remember it!)

"Here's my poem."  Piglet tried to make her speech even and dignified, which is pretty hard for a squealer!

Ode to an Ode

I will raise my voice

In praise of praise

That sheds rays

Of light

Into doomiest

Gloom.

Praise makes laser

Cuts through

Moldy moods

And constant dark broods.

Praise says,

"What we have here

Is worthy of saving

In our internal cocoon

Of poetic

Raving!"

"Wow, Piglet,"  I said, after a moment of surprised and reverent silence.  "That was good!"

Ode to an ode!  How clever!

"The only problem is," Piglet admitted, blushing modestly and looking down at what she had recently learned were sometimes called her front "trotters."  "I don't even know what an ode really is."

I laughed.  "Don't worry, Piglet.  Neither do I.  Why, if I know what an ode is, I'm also a toad!"

We both laughed merrily, but Piglet's laugh was just a little shaky.  I wondered whether she was thinking, "But of course you are toed, silly!" or that she might get run over by a tow-truck coming to take me away.  Or maybe she thought I wanted a kiss!  "Ha, ha, ha, ha!"  I laughed even harder, and Piglet looked a little more nervous.

I'd better go home and look-see if there is a special poetic form supposedly possessed by odes.

Maybe we have written toads!  Ha, ha!

 Piglet's Igloo

Piglet's igloo is melting.

She hung about in a big drift this winter until her hunker heat melted the snow around her body.  Then she went home to her cosy thorny shrub covert and hung out until the watery walls of her drift froze again and turned icy smooth.  Frozy cozy is kind of hard to fathom, but how do you fathom through ice, anyway?  I think ice is unfathomable.

Anyway, all through the winter Piglet has been hanging out in her igloo by the compost pile of those hippies who live down by the riverside.  They have their little granddaughter take out the compost every day and in the winter the ground is too hard for her to bury it.  She just drags leaves and weeds over it, which Piglet can easily root through.

Piglet's especial garbagy favorite is the mash left over from juicing.  If she gets to it quick enough it is a zany vegetable/fruit sherbet!

Other animals like the easy pickings, too.  Piglet, full of waste, has watched mice and voles and grubby moles scamper around the discard pantry grabbing for goodies beneath her regal notice.  It is a regular Hallowed Eve of winter greed!  Every night!  Attracted not by the garbage itself but by the little garbage raiders, caboodles of weasels both large and least, feast.

Owls float silently down and pounce.

Peace-loving hippies don't know what carnage their garbage opportunes!

Winter is departing, though, and Piglet's icy blind is melting.  She doesn't mind.

It wasn't a bad winter, as winters go.

But that isn't saying a whole lot.  Winter doesn't seem to like us creatures much, and we return the favor by not liking it back!

Piglet is prancing in the balmy belief of spring.

Sure, winter might fantasize for a day or two before it melts away in summer air, but Piglet doesn't care.

She's forgotten about it already.  There are fresh new greens to be attending! 

Piglet Linguistics

Piglet is in a State of Confusion.

She speaks English, so she thinks she must be in England.  But she knows that's not true, because her Uncle Ichy told her so, and he is a very well-traveled old boar.

Piglet is, like most North Americans, in the State of Confusion in the United States.

She thinks she ought to speak American, but she's not sure what it is.  She thinks it has something to do with English, but it is mostly just letters. 

Americans, she is beginning to divine, want to just speak in two-syllable words and the Alphabet.  People don't go into rehabilitation, they go to rehab.

You know, like the USA is really the United States of [North] America, but people who speak American say USA.  It's shorter and easier to say - you don't have to move your mouth around and waggle your tongue so much.  Short and easy is important for Americans.

Well, this is okay for Piglet!  The shorter and easier, the better!

People don't go to the University, they go to the "U."  Different Universities have different letters around the "U."

Like airports, except for airports there is no one letter in common.

Piglet thinks maybe the language of Americans is called ACRONYMS, but she's not sure.

All she is sure of is that she's in the State of Confusion, and she can't find that on the map, in the USA or anywhere else.

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