Karen Ashburner

Karen Ashburner owns a sewing business and a fabric store. She sells ribbon. She makes curtains, most of them either pink, or polka dot, or polka dot and pink. If you are a dude, and you come into her shop, you are either gay or lost. In 2009, her house burned to the ground and she lost everything except the clothes on her back. She took the insurance money, bought a farm in the country, and now has three goats, six chickens and two children. The goats she bought from this weird old guy who had, like, seriously, a thousand goats, the chickens she ordered through the mail, the children she made the old-fashioned way, one thirteen years before the fire that took everything she owned, one three weeks after. Some things she has learned in the last few years: baby chicks are really more fragile than you think—they are easy to accidentally kill with either too much heat or not enough; you don’t need to chase a baby goat from pasture to pasture if she gets loose, just tie up the other two and put out some food—she’ll come back; you will miss your stuff more than you think if it all burns to the ground. She drives a Dodge. She lives in a single-wide trailer. She has way too much formal education.


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