Personal Narrative: My Hog Barn

When you have grown up in an environment, oftentimes you fail to realize that experiences that are unique to your circumstances are not universal to all people. For example, the Inuit child cannot comprehend that it is not cold everywhere. Likewise, when I was growing up, I could not comprehend that other children my age did not experience the things I had. Now that I have grown older and my horizons are broader, I have realized that not every child was privileged to grow up on a farm like I was. Not every kid knows where his food comes from, nor does the average child know the joy of jumping on the top of a cotton bale. So with all of that in mind, I have set out to describe a small portion of the farm experience. So now is the question of what part of my experience do I want to describe? Is it the chicken houses, where I labored away, collecting dead birds for disposal? Or is it the sheer joy of planting onions on a cold and rainy February day? No, not a one of these, I want to describe the sights and smells of a humble Hog Barn. Our hog barn is rather inconspicuous when you first walk in. There isn’t a smell that simply gives away …show more content…
The first structure you come to is slightly interesting. It consists of a series of six pine posts, connected by boards, both to each other and to the wall of the barn. Within the confines of the series of posts and interconnecting boards, you find that it has been arranged in such a fashion as to which constitutes a set of stalls. These structures are called farrowing stalls. These stalls are where the mother sows (a sow is a female pig) are taken to give birth. The stalls are set up in such a way that the walls on the inside do not come all the way to the ground so that the baby pigs can go under the walls to another chamber called a “pig bump” to get away from the mother if she is in a foul