Just nauseous at the thought of eating either

We went to see [uncle] L’s baby pigs last night—three little guys, not yet three weeks old. That’s pretty young to wean them, L said. They’re in a little lean-to he built bordering on his horse corral. Cute pigs, but it’s weird to look in their eyes, their sentient eyes, and think that one day L will kill them and eat them. It’s a form of lust, in a sense—wanting their bodies. M asked if [L’s daughter] was gonna be bothered by L killing them.

I remember that rabbit I couldn’t eat at [grandma] P’s—and also lamb, I think. I remember sitting there at the table in breakfast nook, just nauseous at the thought of eating either. If these were separate occasions, I may have melded them in memory. Mint jelly on the lamb, maybe it was cold, I remember poking at a little white tube—an artery?—embedded in the meat. Goat, I don’t think I could eat goat, either. And that time (this was back in ’80s, when we lived here [upstairs] before) I walked in P’s kitchen and saw red bones sticking out of buckets—gristly bones, probably like how my brothers clean meat off deer legs. It’s not perfectly white, the bones. But I think that image gave me nightmares—and maybe that was just a kid thing. It doesn’t bother me now to see my brothers butchering deer, or L skinning beaver (though when I saw him pop apart that beaver’s spine in Dec. ’03 when I went to talk to him about how I’d taken that coyote to school, the sound of that spine coming apart sticks in my head—it seemed just a bit too much like my own spine. How easily that spine came apart, too. But it hasn’t given me nightmares).

I even ate lamp chops from Dad’s lambs when I was in high school. That didn’t bother me too much. But maybe I was a proto-vegetarian all along.

That stew my aunt C’s Chilean (?) boyfriend made, with big chunks of everything—segments of corn on cob, and a hunk of flesh on bone—was that rabbit, too? How I sat on P’s sofa and watched TV, not eating much of the soup sitting there in front of me, on end table, I think.

[From journal of Weds. 6 June 2007, J85, page 265-6]