Straight-Line Thanksgiving
Tags: Short Story, Writing Prompt Response, Blog, This Happened To Me, Thanksgiving

The silence was eerier than the roar.

Wayne came out on the back porch, looking worried. “Are you okay?” he called.

“Yes,” I replied, “What just happened? Was it a tornado?”

Wayne replied, “Don’t think so. Not sure. I’m going to walk around the yard. Looks like we have some damage.”

A few yards to the south of our house was my father’s travel trailer home. He didn’t attend our Thanksgiving dinner because he didn’t like my husband or my husband’s family.

Truthfully, I didn’t like my father much. His absence was a blessing.

Behind his travel trailer was an open shed that he built to house his yellow kayak, a boat that hadn’t touched water in the three years since he purchased it. The roof of the shed was crushed by a large oak that came down in the 30-second wind. The kayak was split in two.

Fortunately, the travel trailer was unscathed. My father came around the corner of his home-on-wheels and surveyed the damage to his shed and boat.

“Well, damn,” he said, “What happened? How could a wind be strong enough to take down a big tree just feet from my trailer and not touch the trailer?”

“What about the Templeton’s house?!” I exclaimed, running up the porch steps, worried about our neighbors who were now hosting the same guests we hosted a short while before.

I grabbed the phone receiver and dialed the number for the Templetons. Ed answered.

“Is everyone okay there? How about your house? Any damage?” I said in a rush.

“Whoa, girl, what are you talking about? I think you had too much Thanksgiving wine!” Ed replied. In the background, I heard talking and laughter.

“The wind. That horrible wind! Do you have any damage?”

Ed chuckled, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What wind?”

While I was on the phone, Wayne took a quick tour of our property. He came in the door to hear me insisting there’d been a fierce wind just minutes earlier.

Wayne took the phone from my hand. “Ed,” he said, “I think we got hit by a straight-line wind. Came all of a sudden. Doesn’t look like the places on either side of us were affected. You?”

“No,” Ed reply, “Nothing here. But, you know, those straight-line winds, they touch down, go a ways, then go right back up. Probably missed us entirely. How much damage you got?”

All told, we had six downed trees, including the one that flattened my father’s shed and halved his kayak, and innumerable branches were scattered about. Fortunately, our home, my father’s trailer, and our vehicles with unscathed.

After hanging up with Ed, Wayne and I walked our property. It was obvious that the straight-line wind touched down at the southwest corner of our land, passed just to the side of my father’s trailer, then journeyed to the front of our property, taking down most of the trees in its path before returning to the sky from the northeast corner of our property. The wind’s path was well-defined by the damage it left behind.

We found pine needles embedded in a telephone pole as if they were knives; the needles unbent but buried deep in the wood of the pole.

I’d never heard of a straight-line wind before, but Wayne enlightened me.

“They come out of a thunderstorm. We didn’t really have a storm but I think the clouds around us contained thunderstorms. The wind came straight down out of a cloud, traveled along the earth before returning to a cloud. I don’t know all the science but a straight-line wind can be almost as powerful as a tornado.”

We spent the weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas cleaning up the mess left by the straight-line wind. Using Wayne’s chainsaw, we made fireplace-size logs out of the downed trees and larger limbs and donated them to elderly people in our church who had fireplaces or wood stoves. Many times over the weeks between one holiday and the next, Wayne and I loaded the back of our pickup truck with logs and delivered them around our county.

Any debris too small to be logged for fireplaces was piled in two large pyramids in our front yard. We burned them over New Year’s.