My Suburban Chicken

Normal people have normal pets. My friend next door had two dogs and my friend Stacey had a lizard. I didn't ever feel weird until my friends came over just to stare at the shed with peeling red paint.  I started to feel like my house was closer to a zoo than a house.
I grew up in Sandy, Utah. It is NOT a farming town. Sandy is very much surburbia at it's finest. You would have to drive a few miles to see anything besides houses and brick school houses.
We were the only family with pets that were a little different. We had a cat, a yellow canary and a chicken.We had a chicken that didn't produce eggs or do anything normal chickens do, besides cluck sometimes when she was nervous.
The story is good but it gets better. Not only did we have a chicken in suburban Utah, the chicken's name was not Florence or Betsy. The bird was appropriately named Ugly. She was missing a ton of feathers from close calls with neighborhood cats.  She also had a beak the seemed to frown all the time and only clucked when she felt nervous. Ugly chicken stopped laying eggs before I was born, but we still nurtured her in a shed in the back yard. She was a pet and part of the family
In the summer, my mom let her out of the shed to wander our large backyard and pick at bugs in my mom's garden.
The worst part about having a chicken in the backyard was feeding her. After dinner my brothers and I would take turns leaving bowls of appropriate dinner leftovers for Ugly. Those moments are still terrifying to think about. The backyard had exactly one light that pointed towards the back of the house towards the trees, not the shed. So I spent the time looking down the back of the house for murders, shuffling to the shed, dumping the bowl of lettuce for Ugly and sprinting back to the house before someone could kidnap me.
Terrifying.
Even though I hated feeding Ugly. I was fond of the awkward chicken.
When I was in first grade, I got this assignment to draw a picture of my family. Like every six year old I included my pets: Butterscotch, the best long-haired tabby cat in the world;  Tweety, originally named yellow canary that appropriately used only the swing in the wire cage; and I couldn't forget about Ugly.