It wasn’t until Rick went away to the States and I had a week off that Rick’s beloved pet pig, Old Lady Lucy, started having trouble.
The first sign was when she showed no interest in a piece of bread. This is a bit like a fierce lioness losing interest in a limping wildebeest.
Lucy’s previous owners regularly fed her day-old donuts, but at our place the occasional piece of bread is as close as she gets to the glory days of her misspent, donut-eating youth.
As a result, she usually snatches bread up. When she wouldn’t even lift her head to eat the bread I’d laid next to her, I was worried.
“What?!” I was horrified. “We can’t simply cull all of our chickens because they couldn’t learn how to use the chicken feeder!”
For the past few months, we’d been hearing stories from our neighbor Aussie Bronwyn about how easy her life was with her ‘Grandpa’s Feeder’ – how she didn’t have to go out and feed her chooks every day, how the sparrows never ate the feed anymore, and how even her clever young hatchlings had learned how to use the feeder.
Naya looked over the fence at our pet kunekune pig, Old Lady Lucy. “She does look a bit more plump, doesn’t she?”
Naya is a vet and a pig farmer. She was wearing a thick knit cap and an old jacket that was tied closed with a bit of twine wrapped around her waist. There was a bit of hay stuck to her left shoulder.
Rick and I had asked Naya to come over to give us her professional opinion. Although Rick and I suspected Lucy was ‘in pig,’ as they say, the simple truth is that city boys like us wouldn’t know a pregnant pig from a bar of soap.
One sunny afternoon a few months ago I noticed that Old Lady Lucy, our pet kunekune pig, was standing in the middle of the top paddock covered in mud and screaming. Something was clearly wrong.
I went over to check on her, but she was irritable, aggressive, and didn’t want to be touched.
So I did what one does when your pet pig turns psychotic. I called the Martinborough Pig Whisperer.
Our very first harvest was just around the corner, but Rick and I had no idea how to harvest and no equipment to do it. So that first year in Martinborough, I volunteered to help Helen at Olivo with their harvest. That way I could learn how to do it myself.
In late May I stood in the Olivo olive grove with Helen and her harvest team – Mavis, Scott and Bernard (pronounced BER-nerd here, not Ber-NARD the American way). Mavis was a thin, elderly woman. Scott and BERnard were clearly used to physical labor. I, it must be said, was not.
Rick and I were standing with our neighbor John down in the olive grove. The trees were thick and green all around us.
“Look how great the grove looks,” Rick said.
John scowled and shook his head. “Well, you’re not done yet.”
Rick and I had only been living in Martinborough for less than a month. When we moved in the grass in the olive grove had been chest high, and John had helped us to hire a contractor to mow it.
Now the beautiful green grass was low to the ground and wonderfully even – with 500 significant exceptions. Around the base of every tree, there was a perfect square of long, ungainly grass that the contractor’s enormous tractor mower hadn’t been able to reach.
“Why won’t you share it?” I asked Rick. We were standing in the kitchen, looking at a carrot cake recipe written on the back of a long, white envelope.
“Because it’s too special,” he answered.
“But all the neighbors are asking for it.”
“Too bad,” Rick said. “If we share this recipe then everyone will make it, and it won’t be special anymore. Besides, it’s the only cake we know how to make! And we can’t serve store bought ever again. The locals will shoot us.”
“There’s a sheep down in your paddock,” our neighbor Jim said over the phone. He’d been working along the fenceline when he saw the sheep. “It looks pretty sick,” he said.
I immediately called Hamish.
Hamish is the stock agent who leases our paddocks to graze his sheep and cattle. He’s in his mid 60s, I’d say, and he’s got a broad New Zealand accent and a gravelly voice. A man of few words, he’s nevertheless friendly in a low-key, Kiwi farmer kind of way.
I looked up at the enormous building and the huge green sign that said “Moore Wilson’s Fresh Market,” and I felt like Dorothy at the gates to the Emerald City.
In my arms I held a heavy cardboard box full of olive oil bottles that I’d carefully labeled the night before. At my side was our good neighbor Kiwi Bronwyn, carrying another box which contained more olive oil, a tablecloth, a bread knife, and some plates and bowls.
Rick stood right behind us, next to our little Nissan Pulsar. He’d just driven us over the Rimutaka Hill Road and into Wellington city for the day.
I should have known that something was wrong when our geriatric rooster, Old Man Henry, started sleeping in the nesting box.
At first Rick and I just figured it was cold and that he’d go back to his low senior citizen’s perch in the spring.
But when I found Henry sleeping smack dab on top of three eggs, we knew something was not quite right.
From then on, Henry was always on the eggs. Every morning I found myself in the odd situation of having to reach under the rooster to gather the eggs from the nesting box.
We were standing in the middle of the olive grove on a cold morning in the middle of May. Nearly five hundred olive trees surrounded us, and there wasn’t a single ripe olive to be seen.
The frosts would be starting soon, but the grove simply wasn’t yet ready for harvesting. We didn’t know what to do.
Frost damage can completely destroy your crop, because it ruins the taste of your oil. We needed more time.
I looked around at all the green olives. “We have to delay the harvest. There’s no choice. We just have to hope the frost doesn’t get us.”
Back in March, just as the fall weather was setting in, Rick and I were talking with our neighbors at a dinner party about getting firewood for the coming winter.
When you heat your home with a woodburner, getting wood in for the winter becomes an annual event, like the changing of the leaves and the onset of shorter, cooler days. Rick and I have been living in the country for over 3 years, and every year we’ve picked up the phone to have firewood delivered.
When I admitted to this, I received some strange looks from around the table that night. I didn’t understand. Had I said something wrong?
Old Man Henry is blind, bow-legged, and pauses strangely after every step. On certain misty mornings he looks like some twisted chicken fancier’s version of Dawn of the Dead.
But he’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner among poultry, and it is by peacekeeping that he earns his keep.
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'Moon over Martinborough' is Jared Gulian's award-winning storytelling blog about being an expat American city boy on a tiny olive farm in rural New Zealand.
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