This past weekend I impregnated my sow.

On Friday I received an eagerly awaited package from our friendly UPS guy. I love delivery people because they always cheerfully hand over your boxes, no questions asked, no eyebrows raised. Sleet and snow and heat and humidity are no doubt some major obstacles faced in the profession, but the most difficult challenge surely must be to keep your mouth shut when delivering interesting parcels. This one said, in bright orange letters, “Handle Gently: Live Boar Semen.” The nice man extended the box to me, wearing the very same pleasant expression as always, and I took it with a ridiculous manic grin on my face. The box was not heavy.

Wrapped inside a foil bag cushioned with ice packs, cradled by a Styrofoam cooler and further enclosed in cardboard, were two plastic squeeze containers roughly the size of toothpaste tubes. Inside, a pretty pink-tinged fluid suspended the genes to artificially inseminate our sow by a carefully selected high-tech “380 Boar” which actually merits his very own logo. Billed in the catalog as THE ULTIMATE COMBINATION IN SWINE GENETICS, caps included, this red-haired cross-bred stud promised to give us progeny with high daily weight gains and lean flavorful meat.

We took the absolute opposite approach last year, trucking in a neighbor’s dog-sized, heritage Mulefoot boar to shack up with our Piggy Lou. They did produce eight delicious progeny, which came out strong and grew lean and large.

But we weren’t in a hurry to replicate their introductory debacle, in which Kong, the “stud,” required three hours of coaxing by a small army of embarrassed teenagers to leap from his perch in the pickup to meet the slathering sow on the ground. The noises they made during the wait were enough to discourage us from trying to bring a boar in again, not to mention that our back fields have been covered in so much snow this year that we weren’t confident the pickup could drive back there. Piggy Lou has probably outgrown her ability to consort with those small, portable heritage breeds, anyway. She’s just too tall and heavy. We felt AI was our only hope of getting her pregnant this winter, in time to have spring piglets that would be big enough to butcher by fall.

My husband had been cautioned by the semen salesperson over the phone that upon arrival, the box had to be kept at a constant temperature between 60 and 65. Of course, the natural place to store it was on the dresser in our bedroom, the coolest room in the house and the one least affected by the ups and downs of our woodstove fire. But the box wasn’t to remain on the dresser long. Once received, the contents had to be used within 5 to 7 days and we had to use it sooner.

to be continued…