Pearls

We sit by the duck ponds, talking shop, reminding ourselves we’re all highly educate animals now and we’ll soon have paper to prove it. I tuck my trotters under my snout and relax with the songbird and the bookworm. They’re my friends, and they’re not too shy or modest to dole out pearls of wisdom, even before swine like me.

The bookworm wraps itself in a daffodil and quotes a bit of Wordsworth. The songbird twitters a chuckle and adds a bit of Bob Dylan. It just sounds like words to my floppy ears, but I don’t mind. The bookworm and I have both found truffles when we dug for them, but it sees the soil so much clearer than I do. And the songbird, being sensitive to the thermals and the wind, it finds things I don’t as well, or at least it sees things from a different angle. I always find myself in between the earth and the sky, never involved enough in either to work out what it’s really all about.

They’re so clever they sometimes talk over my big, pink head. I know what I like, even though it looks to everyone else as though I’m just rolling around in mud. And sometimes, caked in dirt or standing in a strong wind, I feel that I can understand things like they do. But other times, they will fly so far away, or bury themselves so deep, that I don’t understand anything but my own porcine limits.

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