Esther the Wonder Pig

by Steve Jenkins

  They ate their turkey. Derek and I ate the sides. That’s all Derek and I could do, because we hadn’t planned on eating at home. No Tofurky or similar option for us. We kept the adult beverages topped up the whole time—out of necessity. Derek was unhappy. Derek’s mom was unhappy. I was unhappy. Esther was unhappy. We knew Derek’s parents didn’t want to be there. But we soldiered on through dinner, and that didn’t make ours so unlike other family Christmas dinners. With generation gaps and all the political and ideological differences these days, how many families actually are happy at their holiday meals?

  We weren’t mean to one another. No needling, no passive-aggressive criticisms under our breath. Derek and I were frustrated at the turkey scenario and essentially everything else, but I didn’t want to rock the boat with his parents. I’m sure they felt terribly inconvenienced at having to come to us for Christmas and thus not being able to see Derek’s grandparents and other relatives. They weren’t necessarily thinking about how inconvenienced we’d been. It was an ordeal for everyone. We were just trying to stay lubricated enough to not go off the deep end.

  We wound up opening presents on the floor that night. We had no tree, so it was the least festive Christmas gift exchange we’d ever had, but we did the best we could.

  As we all sat on the floor, pretending this was the best day ever, Derek and I kept looking at each other, half smiling and thinking the same thing: We’re never doing this again.

  Meanwhile, poor Esther remained in the basement. Brad and Janice went to bed early. Derek, his sister, her boyfriend, and I ended up drinking another bottle of wine.

  Our visitors left very early the next morning, undoubtedly relieved to be on their way. Derek and I were relieved as well, but it was definitely a Christmas we’ll never forget. We have friends who never see their families for Christmas, and I used to wonder why they would do that. As the years tick by, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me exactly why you would do that!

  It was painfully obvious that we had outgrown our little house. Once the power was back on the visit should have been fairly straightforward, but with the close quarters it was a virtual debacle. Ice storm aside, our family had outgrown the house. Add company and it was just a recipe for disaster. We were starting to come to terms with the fact that we really needed to get out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Let’s face it, we all love a reason to celebrate. And aside from the requisite holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries, there aren’t that many built-in excuses in life to do so. Okay, weddings, job promotions, and pregnancies probably should be in there too. And well… Fridays, meal times (yay, food!), and making a yellow light just before it turns red…

  Okay, fine, I guess there are lots of reasons to celebrate—especially now that social media has deemed every single day some national holiday. (Pancake Day? Left-Handers Day? Really?) But that didn’t stop Derek and me from also creating our own milestones to celebrate as Esther’s fandom grew. (I’ve always been up-front about the fact that we like to party.)

  Esther’s page reached a hundred thousand Likes at the end of February, which is to say just eighty days after it launched, so we decided to commemorate this milestone in style. And by “in style,” I mean we carved a watermelon with “100,000” in it and presented it to Esther as a trophy. A trophy she could eat. As you can imagine, it was well received. When she chomped into it, watermelon squirted in all directions—everywhere. We did it indoors, and it was a spectacular mess: the ceiling, the cupboards… watermelon even sprayed into the other room.

  And that’s when someone from the Toronto Star reached out regarding doing a story about us. From the time we started the Facebook page that first week in December, we were just kind of going along with everything as it came. People would reach out to us and we’d respond, and it all felt safe because we were still communicating online. The virtual interaction gives you that arm’s length feeling of safety.

  But the Star was our local paper, and even at a time when the newspaper industry is steadily on the decline, it’s still a huge deal. The Star is the largest daily newspaper in all of Canada, if you can imagine. It’s been in business for more than 120 years and still maintains a weekday circulation of well over 350,000. (That would be huge even for a U.S. newspaper, and keep in mind that Canada has about one-tenth the population of the United States.)

  So while we remained a bit worried about making Esther’s illegal presence in our home too public (much as it might seem otherwise), we couldn’t say no to the Toronto Star. As much as I go on about our concerns over the zoning laws and all that, I know it’s obvious to anyone reading this that we were proud of our girl and wanted her to enjoy her moment in the spotlight! If it backfired on us, we figured, So it goes. Like I said before, we knew we’d have to move eventually anyway, and we knew we’d have time to make plans when the hammer came down. Even if we didn’t exactly know what those plans would entail.

  We hoped to achieve something else from the article. We wanted the wider audience the newspaper could reach to share our personal transformation because of Esther. We wanted them to see her smile and make the connection that this wonderful animal was their bacon. We also wanted to make it clear that people shouldn’t run out and get their own pigs just because they fell in love with Esther. This was a drastic, life-altering situation for us. Though we’d found a way to make it work, most people couldn’t possibly do what we’d done.

  Also, we’d learned more over time about the whole mini pig/baby pig switcheroo. It seems that I’m hardly the only one to fall for that. Turns out people get screwed the way we did all the time. It would be funny if it didn’t turn out so horribly in practice, because almost every other time it happens, it turns out very badly for the pigs. They get sent to shelters. Some end up being euthanized. We felt an obligation to warn people so they didn’t make the same mistake we did.

  Our story ended up on the second page of the Star. And it wasn’t just the stamp-sized picture and a couple of sentences as we’d feared—it was a gorgeous, prominent, amazing story. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. It’s like having a massive audience on prime-time television while simultaneously being the top trend on Twitter. And the response was just as epic. The next thing we knew, two Canadian television networks—City and Global—wanted to cover Esther’s story. By this point, we pretty much just said yes to everything. Hell, at that point the cat was out of the bag—or the pig was out of the poke, as it were.

  After a while, it became old hat. We’d get the house clean and field the usual questions about how Esther had come into our lives and the effect she’d had on us and her huge (and quickly growing) base of followers. And every time when we thought life was starting to settle down into a new normal, something else would happen. It seemed like our story was everywhere. Our friends and family were freaked out that we were becoming quasi-celebrities based on the fact that we’d fallen in love with a pig. Regardless, it was clear the other shoe was about to drop: We’d just gone public in the most obvious ways, so we knew we’d have to move soon.

  It was game over in Georgetown. It was just a matter of when.

  Derek and I had talked about getting a farm. The more our lives changed, the more it started to make sense to us. It was still a dream, and a lofty one at that, but in the back of our minds we wondered if we could really make it work. What if we did buy a farm? What if we built a sanctuary so we could rescue lots of animals like Esther?

  We decided to put up a post on our page to see what everybody thought. Esther’s fans had been so involved in the entire story that we cared about their opinions. Also, in some subconscious way, I’m sure we wanted to give a large number of people the opportunity to provide us that “snap out of it” smack like Cher delivered to Nicolas Cage in the film Moonstruck. We needed that. Left to our own devices, you can see where we ended up: two men, two dogs, two cats, and a pig in a 1,000-square-foot house.

  So we put up a post saying we were considering moving to
the country, purchasing a farm, and turning it into a sanctuary. The response from Esther’s fans was overwhelmingly positive. Also, a local real estate agent wrote to us, saying that her parents owned a pig farm, and she wanted to take us to see it.

  Everything seemed to be falling into place. Maybe a bit too easily.

  The agent took us to see the farm. I kind of liked it, but Derek was underwhelmed. It was a long single-story barn. Honestly, it looked like a long, ugly house with a bungalow attached where we would live. It really wasn’t very special, to put it very nicely. And I did need Derek to be the levelheaded one so I could see it more clearly. I think I was just excited by the idea of having some land. There was no urgency yet, so we left it alone for about a month.

  We’d only seen that one underwhelming farm at that point, but even given that anticlimactic visit, we’d been bitten by the farm bug. So we decided to look at a few more.

  When we found the farm, it was a total fluke. I was looking for listings to show a client and happened to be showing them a property two doors up. But when I was doing my searches, I came across a listing for Cedar Brook Farm. My clients were looking in a price range Derek and I hadn’t considered before, almost $300,000 over our budget. The farm certainly wasn’t something I would show my clients. But I found myself reading the description anyway, telling myself, “I’ll just take a peek at these photos,” knowing in the back of my mind I was on a mission. What I didn’t expect was for the photos to reveal everything I could ever have wanted for Derek and me, and from the photos alone, price be damned: I knew I had to show it to Derek.

  Prior to that point, even when we talked about it on Facebook, the idea of owning or operating a sanctuary was nothing more than a dream. It was a wonderful dream, but at best, it was something we thought we might try to tackle someday far in the future. Not at this point in our lives.

  Those photos, though.

  I couldn’t get it out of my head. (And a farm is a very large thing to have stuck in your head.)

  I printed out the listing itself and made a special trip to the office to print the farm’s photos in color. Then I came home and handed the printouts to Derek.

  “We need to see this,” I said.

  I watched Derek look over the listing and carefully examine the photographs, his eyes widening. Was that a twinkle in his eye?

  Then I heard him scoff.

  Yeah, there’s the other shoe dropping. He’s looking at the price.

  He looked up at me the way a parent looks at a child whose face is covered with chocolate and crumbs and who swears he did not eat that piece of cake. I knew that look. But I also knew that twinkle. And for whatever reason, he relented and agreed to take a drive with me that morning to “just check it out.”

  “This is not going to be another Georgetown,” he said. And I knew exactly what he meant. Before we bought the Georgetown house, I had been showing the property to another client, but I called Derek and told him I’d found our house and that he needed to come over right away. He did, and we bought it that night.

  “The location is amazing,” I said, and he agreed that it was.

  The price? Less amazing.

  To be fair, I probably didn’t expect it to be as perfect in real life, because nothing ever is. I knew the farm could be like a date with someone you met on the Internet. The object of your affections seems so clever in online communications and the photos look amazing. When you meet in person, it turns out the photo was ten years old and taken from that one good angle that hides the lazy eye and hideous hairline. Oh, and the person is three inches shorter and forty pounds heavier than advertised—and has the personality of a rice cake.

  Only this Internet date was like if George Clooney and Megan Fox had a baby. Indescribably perfect. And now I had the agony of knowing how much we loved it and how there was no way in hell we could afford it.

  And I needed it.

  I was in love.

  (I know. I do that a lot. Just work with me here.)

  The minute we pulled up the driveway, the property seemed magical. From the winding driveway that crossed a stream to the thick forest that blocked the buildings from the road, plus the centuries-old stone walls that divided the fifty-acre property from end to end, it was breathtaking.

  We hadn’t even gotten out of the car when we turned to each other and said, “This is it.” Sometimes you just know in life. Like when I first laid eyes on Derek or when that Facebook “friend” said, Do you know anyone who might want a mini pig? We knew this was our farm.

  The barn was a filthy mess—cobwebs hanging up to three feet from the ceiling—and it had apparently become a storage/junk collection space. There were no fences other than the collapsing stone walls, but it had so much potential. The house was solid and clean, but it couldn’t have been further from our style. Nor did it have things we thought all houses had, like a furnace for heat. As you recall, we’re not huge fans of freezing our asses off. But it wasn’t about the house or the barn or the fences (or lack thereof). There was just something about the property itself we both immediately fell in love with. And even though, cosmetically, it needed a ton of work, we both knew it was perfect.

  Surprisingly, Derek was ready to jump immediately. I, however, was terrified about the cost. What happened to “This is not going to be another Georgetown?” Now I was the one starting to think more responsibly. (Who would have thought?) It was definitely more than we needed, by a lot. But as we were making these big life changes to accommodate our new life with Esther, it just started making sense. Whatever its flaws, this would be a great place to create an animal sanctuary. If you looked at Derek and me and what our lives at the time were all about, this made no sense at all. But with one pig’s smile and the encouragement of thousands of strangers, somehow this made perfect sense.

  We felt like this was our opportunity to—as cheesy as it sounds—do our part to change the world. (Like I said, work with me.) We really thought we could make a difference, and it felt like anything was possible.

  We would have been happy to move into a little house on a few acres and just keep doing what we were doing with Esther, but we had been presented with this opportunity to maybe do something so much bigger. So how could we pass it up, no matter how scary it was?

  Then again, maybe we were delusional, because everybody in our life and their brother thought we were nuts. I can imagine what they were thinking: You’re two guys and a pig. How do you think you’re going to raise the half a million dollars you’d need to actually buy this place? (And that’s presuming we could get the owners to even consider such a low offer.)

  But then we posted the idea on Esther’s Facebook page as a hypothetical. (We liked treating the page sort of like a Magic 8 Ball.) We told them we’d found something we loved, but we explained the situation about the cost. We floated the idea of turning it into a sanctuary, and the Comment feed lit up like we had never seen before. Private message after private message came flying in telling us to go for it: We’ve got your back. Follow your hearts. You know you can do this. You got this, yes! (And every other possible iteration of affirmative.) It was a seemingly never-ending series of the most uplifting and reassuring comments you can imagine. We essentially had a hundred thousand cheerleaders making us think this was possible. People were coming from every direction, offering to contribute and help us do it, and that’s how the idea of a crowdfunding campaign came to be.

  We figured we had no choice but to throw an offer out there and see what happened. If they accepted it, we would figure out the next steps. If not, at least we tried. It was the reaction from the Facebook page that made us think we might actually be able to do something bigger than what we had initially thought.

  So yeah, we drank the Kool-Aid.

  Things moved fast, which I’m sure is no surprise. When I decide to do something, I can’t stand any grass growing under my feet. Call it a strength; call it a weakness—sometimes it’s both wrapped up in an enchilada—but I’m all
about immediate action. So the time between Derek and my visiting the farm, discussing the idea, asking the fans, and actually making the offer was negligible. It all went down in just three days. The support from the page was enough for us to feel like we could do this, and that gave us the courage to put in an offer at their asking price but with a sixty-day conditional hold to close on the property.

  I knew damn well that the offer was totally unacceptable when I put it in. Remember, I work in real estate, and I know asking for sixty days is ridiculous, especially in the best real estate market possible. We’d be asking them to take the farm off the market for two months when they’d told us there was already a competing offer in place. Yeah, there was also that to worry about. We might as well ask Bradley Cooper’s agent whether he’d work for scale (the lowest possible rate) to star in a film of Esther’s life story. In the role of Esther.

  I explained all that to Derek as I prepared the paperwork. I guess I was trying to soften the blow for him (and for myself) if they rejected it. But that was the only offer we could make. We didn’t have four hundred grand in our back pocket, and that was the number we’d decided we would need for a down payment to make paying off the rest of the farm possible. It’s funny how things like “reality” set in when you’re in the quiet of your mind and not delusional from the eternal optimism of a hundred thousand strangers (all of whom we love, but none of whom had accepted the responsibility, at least at that time, of paying for this farm).

  I just wanted us to brace ourselves, because we had really fallen hard for the farm. Once Derek and I sat down and had a heart-to-heart, we agreed that we truly didn’t think the owners would accept the offer, but we had to give it a shot. If we didn’t, we’d always think in the back of our minds, Remember that perfect farm? What if we’d made an offer and they’d said yes?