The last thing anyone wants to do in cold weather is deal with self-centered, rambunctious, barnyard pigs. At least that’s what Gayle tells me.
Try to imagine this scene: Gayle is standing in a hog pen, wearing her nightgown, slippers, and a winter coat, swinging a garden rake at a bunch of pigs. Why, you might ask?
Let me back up.
Earlier that morning, Gayle’s neighbor Rob was feeding his pigs. The excited pigs acted like they hadn’t eaten in a decade—even though Rob had fed them hours earlier. They rammed Rob against the fence.
They knocked him down and trampled his leg. He screamed. And he discovered he’d broken his leg and couldn’t walk.
Luckily Rob had his cellphone. He called Gayle, his closest neighbor, while he was lying in the mud. He barely knew her, but she was closer than a hospital.
Gayle answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, Gayle,” he said. “It’s your neighbor, Rob.”
“Hi, Rob, what’s up?”
Rob, lying in the mud, glanced at the greedy pigs, eating slop over his limp and lifeless body. “Oh, not much,” he said. “What have
you been up to lately?”
“Not much. How are you?”
“Can’t complain. Hey listen, are you busy?”
At the time, she was babysitting her daughter’s children. She was making breakfast, baking cookies, doing grandma things.
“A little busy,” she said. “Why?”
“No reason,” he said. “I’ve broken my leg and I think I’m dying.”
She threw the kids into the truck, then raced to Rob’s house. She found him lying in the pen, covered in muck.
“I don’t know how Gayle did it,” Rob explains. “I thought I was hallucinating, I mean here comes this crazy lady in a nightgown, fighting pigs with a garden rake, lifting me into the truck all by herself.”
But Gayle’s not crazy. Not technically. She was a fifty-seven-year-old, independent, and tough woman. She’d survived one husband and raised…