Make Room in the Freezer, Folks

Last week I was doing a prenatal with a homeschooling Mama. She's a lovely woman, a repeat client who has sweet children. She told me about their 12 year old son, who raised a hog all on his own so that when it came time to slaughter, they could donate all the meat to the Hope Clinic food bank. Sweet kid.
They also raised two other hogs for themselves and family. They hadn't done it before, but certainly have the land to do so. All in all, the project worked beautifully and they raised fat, healthy hogs. She admitted she was a little sad to see them go.
I told her that if she ever raised more hogs in the future, I'd definitely be interested in buying half of one. She told me that unfortunately, all the pork was spoken for. Oh well...
It's nice buying meat from people we know. Our beef came from a midwife friend in the middle of the state. Our lamb came from my business partner's sister, and our chickens are at our 3 family co-op farm.
Anytime we'd have pork, we'd buy it at the Farmer's Market. But it's expensive when you buy it single portion like that, so I wouldn't do it often.

Over the weekend I was in Traverse City for the Midwives Alliance of North America annual conference.
It was a crazy, hectic weekend, but a good one. At any rate, I got a phone call during a session I was recording on Friday morning from a my client. I recognized the number and went out into the hall to answer, hoping she was okay. (All of our clients knew we were at the conference, we also had a back up midwife back home still on call for anyone who needed a midwife.) I answered my phone in a near whisper, afraid to hear worrisome concerns about miscarriage or something along those lines. Instead, I heard: Great news! I have half a hog available in you want it!
Phew! and Yes!
She gave me a few details and said she'd call later in the day with more details and information about the butcher so that I could order the cuts as specified.
That second phone call came during a Q&A panel with Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein from The Business of Being Born inside Michael Moore's State Theater in downtown Traverse (which is lovely and reminds one of Ann Arbor's State Theater). I stepped out into the lobby to talk to the butcher on my cell, whispering again and taking notes on the back of a ticket stub.
The butcher's wife was super sweet. We talked for at least a half hour. She held my hand through the whole process, discussing the costs between sausage patty and links (brats or breakfast) what roasts I'd have to sacrifice to sausage making, how many pounds of this or that and how much the smoking process costs. I got off the phone happily knowing that in a week, 110 pounds of pork will have to be picked up in Assumption, Ohio (I'm sure that's outside of the 100 Mile mark for eating local, but the hog itself was raised about 30 miles from here.)Then I joined my friend back in the theater. We decided to leave the Q&A in favor of walking the drag in Traverse, getting coffees and loitering lazily in a coffee shop for 2 hours.

One definitely gets over-saturated with birth at a midwifery conference. I sadly realized that my only vacation this year, the only time to truly be off-call and not be obsessive with my cell phone, was spent around 250+ other midwives talking about birth and scary legislation issues. Not so relaxing.
At least I got a half a hog out of it, and a nice conference tshirt from our own VG Kids.