By By LYDIA GRIMES Feature Reporter
Next week I will get back to another family chart, but with Thanksgiving coming up I thought I would tell you a little story about Thanksgiving. I have told this before but it bears repeating. I think it is funny, and maybe you will too.
This is a story of my husband's aunts, Thelma and Gladys, who lived in Covington County while growing up. They married and moved away from the old home place, but they continued to see each other on holidays.
Gladys was the type of person who could make a joke out of most everything.
One Thanksgiving they told the tale of a Thanksgiving turkey and it's misfortune of meeting up with them. The whole episode was one that was typical of these two dear ladies. They had fun together and would rope anyone else into their escapades if they got a chance. I spent some good times with them on trips that we made to visit another sister in South Carolina doing my genealogical research.
The times we had there make for another story. There was never a dull moment. This story is only an example of their humor.
Thanksgiving was coming up. Gladys Grimes and Thelma Moody decided that this year they were going to get a live turkey instead of the usual frozen one. They found a bird, took him home, put him in a shed out in back of the house and fed him corn to fatten him up. You can guess what happened.
They became very good friends with the bird, and everyone knows it's hard to eat your friends.
Thanksgiving was fast approaching and the two ladies were losing their appetite for the traditional dinner. Both of them decided to let the other sister do the dirty deed of dispatching the turkey. The problem was that neither one wanted the job.
The day before Thanksgiving, they knew they had to do something. It was time to take care of the turkey and get him ready for the dinner table.
They took the bird out of the shed and after debating the situation one of the sisters finally swung the axe and bashed him in the head. When the bird dropped on the ground, they quickly took him into the house and started to pluck his feathers, secure in the fact of having a nice turkey for the Thanksgiving table.
Just as they finished plucking all his feathers, the bird began to wake up. It seems that he was not dead. The axe had only stunned him. The two sisters looked at each other and knew they were in trouble. The bird was not dead. He was alive and they were going to have to hit him again. They knew that they couldn't chop on him anymore. They figured the best thing to do was to eat something else for Thanksgiving but they still had the problem of the turkey and what to do with him.
Now it's cold in November and this poor turkey could not go around without any feathers. The sisters came up with a solution to the problem. They got some of Thelma's daughter's doll clothes and soon had the best dressed turkey in town (excuse the expression).
They loaded him in the car, took a little drive in the country, and set that bird free on a wooded patch of land.
By this time in the story telling, I am about to roll in the floor with laughter. I guess they knew that I am a gullible person, but even I now have realized that this story is a little bit farfetched.
Gladys and Thelma topped off their story by telling that they heard later some hunters were out in the woods hunting and one of them told a tall tale about seeing the strangest sight he had ever seen.
It seems he saw what looked like a turkey wearing clothes. He was sure that he was seeing things because as everyone knows, birds don't dress up in dresses and bonnets.
Gladys is gone now, but Thelma is still around.
I never see her or think about them without remembering this story. It has become a fondly remembered story to tell on Thanksgiving.