The House on the Hill: Honey, Pigs, and One Unfortunate Rat

When I was about five or six, we lived in a little clapboard house on a hill. It sat right along a two-lane road, and to me, that hill felt massive back then—like climbing a mountain just to get home. We didn’t have much, but we had what we needed. And, apparently, that included a free supply of honey.

One day, my brother and I found out there were honeybees living inside the side of the house. Now, most kids might have run the other way at the sight of a beehive, but not us. We saw free honey. And instead of thinking about stings or getting in trouble, we did the only logical thing—we peeled off a small board and helped ourselves.

I don’t even remember how we discovered it or how long we kept sneaking honey from that little spot. We just knew that whenever we wanted, we could walk over, pull back that board, and get a sweet taste of real honey—right from the side of the house. The bees never bothered us. It was like they just accepted that we were part of their world, two little kids who had found nature’s candy and weren’t about to let it go to waste.

That house wasn’t just home to honeybees, though. We had chickens, and we even had a pig. And let me tell you, that pig was a menace.

I don’t know how many times that pig got out, but every single time it did, it came after us. And every single time, my brother and I would sprint for the giant rock in the yard—a boulder, really—and climb up on it, hollering for Mom to come save us. It was our emergency evacuation plan, pig edition. 🐷😂

That pig had it out for us, I swear. I don’t know if it was just playing, if it thought we were part of its herd, or if it genuinely enjoyed watching us run for our lives. Either way, we weren’t taking any chances. That rock was our only safe zone.

But out of all the animals in that yard, the worst trouble came from something much smaller—a rat.

One day, my sister was out in the chicken barn when a rat bit her. Just out of nowhere, CHOMP. And when something bites you out in the country, you don’t just let it go—you have to make sure it wasn’t carrying something nasty. So, Mom had to send the rat’s head off somewhere to be tested for rabies.

Thankfully, it came back clear—no rabies, no plague, no horror movie outcome. Just another weird little chapter in the story of that house.

That’s just how life worked back then. One day, you’re eating honey out of the side of the house. The next, you’re running from a rogue pig or mailing a rat’s head off for testing. Just another day in the wild world of growing up in that little house on the hill.

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