Bonding Through Birds

Kindness spreads through this Kentucky nursing facility, but it starts with feathered friends at a window.

- The editors at Reader's digest

Joe Hall is mostly paralyzed from the shoulders down, but that doesn’t keep him from his favorite hobby—photographing birds. A special camera setup lets him capture a photo with just a twitch of his finger. This photo of Joe was taken by his friend Tommy Warren.

For Tammy Ray of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, the healing moments come when she’s washing Joe Hall’s window. “I get more out of scraping bird poop than a lot of the other things I do,” Tammy says, laughing.

Tammy, a nurse practitioner, is one of those people for whom the coronavirus has meant more work, not less. Based at Fort Knox, she cares for soldiers, veterans and their families. With her clinic off-limits to all but the most urgent cases, COVID-19 regulations have her working virtually almost all the time, using Zoom and phone calls to try to help stressed-out patients she can’t even touch.