America is a beautiful thing…
Ursula is fifty-four and has a son and some ex-husbands and lives alone in a pre-fab house on two acres of sun-baked scrub grass in eastern Tennessee. She chain smokes and has a prosthetic leg, the original she lost in a motorcycle accident. I met her two summers ago, the friend of a friend.
For a living, Ursula raises chickens, ducks and turkeys of various varieties and sells eggs, chicks and birds. Behind her house, she’s constructed a large fenced pen with coops scattered about inside. The work is rough, four-by-four posts, weathered two-by-fours and chipboard, chicken wire, nylon tarps, a torn shade tent with a splinted aluminum leg, sun-greyed barn wood, sagging and decrepit coops scavenged from failed farms, two aluminum enclosed trailers with shelves of nests and flat tires, plastic sheeting, ropes, straps, wire and whatever other materials came to hand. A red and white “Yield” sign is mounted on top of one of the fence posts, an odd juxtaposition.
Her birds and dogs follow her around the yard as she does her chores. When she sits to rest and smoke, they tussle to sit on her lap. She has conversations and lectures them, “Bernie, leave her alone. You know better than that. Oh Abner, stop it. Come here buddy.” Bunny, the one-legged chicken that was living in her living room when I was there last has died. Ursula celebrates the joys of birth and life and grieves and prays over their loss; she misses them, her animals that have died, and talks about them but doesn’t seem to mourn them. It’s farm life.
Predators, raccoons, foxes, rats, raptors, and neighbor dogs, are a constant menace. The neighbor’s pit bull broke into her yard and went after her birds and she shot it in the face with her air rifle to drive it off. The dog’s fine and hasn’t been back. She trapped a raccoon that was stealing eggs and chicks. The trap was a live-trap, I watched as she shot the raccoon dead with the pellet gun as it snarled at her through the wire cage. She threw the carcass into the woods behind her fenced yard. She has three small dogs, the black one, Sportster, kills rats.
She has a Harley, the one she was riding when she lost her leg was totaled and she bought another one. She doesn’t ride it much and she’s been trying to sell it but that would make her a biker without a bike and she’s priced it accordingly. Her daily driver is a faded-black, rattle-bang Ram pickup, the black plastic dashboard broken and sagging from the Tennessee sun, the cab and the bed littered with poultry farm material, equipment and bits. Money is tight and she works several days a week as a home health aide for her neighbor, Mr. Glenn, he’s 95; Mrs. Glenn died a year ago. He pays her cash. Ursula texted me after I left, “I took a fantastic nap after you left and then when I got to Mr. Glenn’s house, I made chocolate chip cookies and then a good supper and now I am headed to get minnows for the ducks.”
On the grass just outside the fence gate, she has a weathered coffee table and two chairs. We leaned back in the chairs and rested our legs on the table as the sun set and the evening cooled the air around us and we passed a joint of Michigan Lemon Bar and drank Coors Light. She’d left the gate open and the birds pecked at the grass around our feet and the dogs jumped onto the table and squirmed into our laps and the angel moths flitted about. As birds came close, she picked them up and cuddled them and talked about their personalities and then about their genetic makeup, what was good and what was bad and how best to interbreed to encourage the good. She used the multisyllabic language of science, like she knew what she was talking about.
After a while, I asked her, “Is this really sustainable?” And waved my arm at her creation around us.
Bird farming starts early and ends late and demands a lot of chasing, stooping and lugging. She got a new leg this spring, it has suspension and a greater range of ankle motion than the old one and it’s easier on her body. But it’s a prosthetic leg all the same; ulcers, pressure sores, blisters, prosthetics are uncomfortable and need constant care. At the end of the day, she’s tired and sore. She’s talking about veterinary school. The University of Tennessee has a program. It would take her eight years to get her degree. She’s thinking about it. She wants to work with farm animals. She’s worried that she’s bad at math.
She didn’t hesitate to answer my question, “No, not sustainable. I’ve been doing this for four years, I’m tired.”
Ursula wasn’t raised country, she was a Navy brat, she grew up and went to high school on the Naval Weapon Station in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was career Navy, a submarine man. She worked for twenty years in banking and commercial real estate in Chicago. She has most of a bachelors degree. Her last husband beat her. I asked her what she thought of Harris. “I’m not voting for her,” she said, she said it fast so the words were a blur of syllables, like she was pouncing, like she’d been ready for my question to poke out of its nest. And then she said, “Let’s not talk about politics.”
