A Memorable Thanksgiving Holiday
- November 28, 2005
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Thanksgiving was pretty memorable this year. We had family in from all over the place. At one point, we had 17 people in the house. Thankfully, not all of them were staying at the house with us, but that’s still a fair amount of people to have over.
Thanksgiving lunch was the big gathering though. Family from all over this area gathered at a local church meeting hall and brought some kind of dish. I didn’t take a head count, but I would imagine there were around 40 of us there. There was so much food, it filled two long tables. Even with 40 of us eating, there was a lot of left-overs. I learned my lesson a while back about over-eating on Thanksgiving, so I only ate until I was full.
While family was over, we watched football games and movies. We played games and talked and had a good time. My cousin’s husband is a physical therapist, so he showed several of us some good stretching exercises to feel better. My sister’s husband is a certified master mechanic and he helped my grandfather get his truck back in running order.
My other sister didn’t have a good Thanksgiving break. First, one of her favorite cats was killed early Saturday morning. That already upset her, but then her ex-boyfriend was killed in a tragic hunting accident a couple hours later. They were still friends and had just talked the night before. She’s still upset about it, and probably will be for a while.
Sunday was exciting and scary for all of us. A really bad storm rolled through yesterday. It was the lower bands of a huge storm that messed up a lot of the midwest. It was windy all morning, but didn’t look too bad. A friend of mine showed up to visit for a bit before heading down to Texarkana. My friend had told me that it had been storming over at De Queen, but it was still sunny here. I checked the weather on the computer and saw a huge wall of orange and red coming towards us. My friend decided to stick around instead of trying to drive through it, and it’s a good thing he did because the wind was just getting started.
While we were talking, it began raining pretty hard. About 10 minutes later, it started hailing pretty bad. Nothing huge, but a lot of nickel and dime size hail. Not big enough to do damage to cars, but still unnerving. And all through this, the wind kept getting stronger and stronger. The weather radio kept going off about every five minutes with a new warning or watch alert. While my friend and I were watching the storm from the back door, we saw the wind shift direction in an instant and start really whipping the trees around. A few seconds later, my sister called and said the Lockesburg tornado alarms were going off and that a tornado had been spotted a couple miles south of our house heading north. So I grabbed my phone, my iPod (it has all my work backed up on it) and Shorty (one of my dogs) to run out to the cellar. My mother grabbed Tinker (the other dog) and was right behind me. Dad and my friend were right behind her.
We stayed inside the cellar for about five minutes until it seemed like things had died down a bit. Dad and I went out to check, and saw some really scary looking tendrils coming down from one cloud, so we ran back inside the cellar to wait some more. After another five minutes, the worst was passed and we could begin to relax. My sister called again and said the tornado was already past us and was heading further northeast.
So as you can see, it was certainly a memorable Thanksgiving break for me and my family. I’m hoping there won’t be too many Thanksgivings like this one.