There are pigs floating across my screen. By some miracle I have learned how to adjust my screen saver so that I can have any or all of my photos wander through my screen once I have quit doing stuff on the computer. All I need to do is switch from fiddling with the internet to French test corrections for about ten minutes then it begins to happen. When the pigs appear I must think again, are they the pigs from St. Omer in northern France, the pigs which will be sold to Belgian processors, or are they the clean little pigs from the farm just 45 minutes from Münster who just begged to be picked up by the passer-by? In France the pig farmer was particularly proud of his computerized feeding system. But it was the German farmer who explained to me how the exact mix of ingredients was crucial to weaning the piglets off of mother's milk and onto "real" food. Although we are all part of the European Union here on the continent, and standards have to be maintained, pig farmers do display a few cultural differences. My guess is though, that if you grab a baby pig by the middle it will squeal regardless of which language its owner speaks. One must grab the hind leg to lift the piglet out and have a closer look if one wants to avoid the squeal. It was clear to me that these German pigs are kept clean, although the farmer assured me that his farm isn't as clean as he would like it to be. There is a tradition here in Westfalia, called the "Westfalia Divide". When folks get together, eventually the women and the men tend to form up gender-specific groups for their own separate chats. So while Andrew was taking care of the beer which needed to be drunk with the other men, I was privy to the house interior, where I was treated to a tour of the hand-painted family tree, the blue cloth printing blocks and then the garden... Oh what a garden! The mother, and now grandmother, created and cares for a garden to knock your socks off. There is a carefully laid-out French-style garden with little, precisely trimmed hedges, there are literally fields of snow bells, the little harbingers of spring, a bit early this year and oh, how she told me of the colors yet to appear. Right in the midst of it all, there stood planted a large stone with ancient-appearing letters and numbers engraved on the sides. It had marked the boundary between the Catholic and the Protestant regions here about hundreds of years ago. It rather made the earth tremble with history, especially knowing that the Autobahn was just a stone's throw away and definitely within view of the farm. Meanwhile Anika, the four-legged hunting dog, queen of the show, froliked among the sunlit blanket of blossoms. In spite of a slight chill in the air, we sat out in the garden for freshly-made waffles with warm cherries and ice cream. Just before departure back to city life, Ol got out his skeet shooting gun and gave Anika a bit of practice being patient while he shot at clay pigeons. It was not clear who was more excited, Anika, hearing the gun, or Andrew being invited to go shooting the following day.
