Barbara Wood's Dispatches from the Home Front: It was a Mother's Day to remember Barbara Wood's Dispatches from the Home Front: It was a Mother's Day to remember (May 18, 2005)

The look the checkout clerk at the hardware store gave me was one of intense pity.

Not because my husband was giving me a hardware store gift certificate for Mother's Day, and not because he bought it right in front of me. The pity was in response to what he said when she asked what amount to make the certificate for: "What's the minimum?"

I have warned him before not to joke with strangers.

Besides, the gift card was the best thing about my Mother's Day.

The dog woke me up at 7 a.m., whining to go outside.

I let him out, made myself a mocha and curled up in my favorite chair with the newspaper.

Then my daughter appeared and, without mentioning Mother's Day, began to figure out how much the pigs we were going to buy that day as this year's 4-H project should weigh.

When she said 90 pounds I panicked. Last year's pigs had weighed only 95 put together. No way would we cram two 90-pound pigs in the dog crate we had borrowed.

In my pajamas and unable to see because I didn't have my contact lenses in, I tromped next door and borrowed another dog crate.

Then, realizing it was only a half hour until we had to leave, I woke up my husband. We hurriedly loaded the truck we had borrowed, discovering in the process that the new dog crate had no wire door on the end. The people I had borrowed it from were gone, so we grabbed a piece of chicken wire and some rope and, since I didn't have time to make coffee, warmed up some from the day before, and hopped in the pickup.

And then hopped back out when we realized we had no directions to Fresno State, where the pigs were. Once we got directions it was too late to make our anticipated stop for pastries at the local bakery.

Instead, we breakfasted at a Burger King in Gilroy at about 10:30 a.m. I noticed very few other mothers celebrating Mother's Day there.

Along the way my older daughter called from her dorm room in San Diego to wish me a happy Mother's Day and complain about how she'd gotten sunburned the day before.

We arrived in Fresno only about 10 minutes late, picked out two wonderful pigs and loaded them in the crates. We shoved them up against the back of the pickup cab and tied them securely.

But the pig in the door-less crate wasn't happy. He tried to remove the wire with his snout, getting far enough several times that we had to stop to reattach it.

Between stops, I called my mother and wished her a happy Mother's Day.

We got back to Woodside at 4:30 p.m. By the time we had made sure the pigs had food, water and shelter, and attempted to fill in a hole last year's pigs had made in the pen, we were muddy, tired and hungry.

We threw on clean clothes and headed off to a buffet salad bar for dinner, because it was nicely located halfway between the self-service car wash where we could clean up the mess the pigs had made of the truck and the home of the friend we had borrowed it from.

Maybe that look of pity had been deserved.

Barbara Wood lives in Woodside in an old house filled with redheads and animals. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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