Early last winter, squeals pierced the crisp air as the Williams men and the cook, Peggy/Margaret, had slaughtered, cleaned, skinned, eviscerated, and butchered about two dozen, 250-pound, mud-covered, splotchy white hogs. Peggy/Margaret and two of her teenaged daughters rubbed bay salt and salt-petre into the hog parts as a preservative, then they pushed pieces of the pork fat and muscle through a meat grinder. Using well-cleaned hog intestines as casings, they hand-mixed fennel seed, parsley, sage, pepper, and salt into the ground hog meat. The meat-filled casings were twisted twice every four inches to form long sausage links. Peggy/Margaret hung the aromatic ropes in the six-foot square smokehouse, which was located next to the outdoor summer kitchen. The sausages would cure for several months. Everybody knows the sweltering Maryland summer heat makes it impossible to keep food stuffs from spoiling, so meats eaten during the spring and summer months were often preserved the prior winter.

HI Lynda. Thanks for the comment. When I Googled for the source of the quote I landed on Quote Investigator. There was a long list of possible originators of the quote. Quote investigator states “The first known instance in the English language was a sentence translated from a text written by the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. The French statement appeared in a letter in a collection called “Lettres Provinciales” in the year 1657:

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

Here is one possible modern day translation of Pascal’s statement. Note that the term “this” refers to the letter itself.

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

I used the unsubstantiated Mark Twain version because I believed more people know the name of Mark Twain than Blaise Pascal. Which shows my bent to helping people become good storytellers (as opposed to factual reporters)..My writing teacher used to say something like “sometimes you have to make things up to tell a truth.” (not in journalism, of course, only in storytelling.) Thanks again for taking the time to comment!.