I live in Central Texas, in fact, the reason I live here is because my husband was stationed at Ft. Hood before he left the military.
Thursday November 5th, 2009 turned out to be a surreal day. I was at lunch with a friend when we heard about the shooting spree on Fort Hood.
We were glued to the television while we ate.
When I got in the car I scanned the radio stations as I drove back to work but they didn't have any news on them.
Once back at work I found an MSN feed for the story and kept updated.
The only people who came into the store after 3:00 p.m. Thursday were my and my co-workers relatives. The normally busy street outside the store was empty.
We heard so many conflicting stories from the different news sites that at one point it seemed like the shooting was escalating outside Fort Hood and we thought about shutting down the store and going home.
A friend was on post when this happened and he was almost at the gate when they locked down the post. He was the second car in line and had to wait there for six hours until they opened up again.
One of my co-worker's father-in-law works at a school on post. They didn't get the last of the children out of the school until after 9:00 p.m..
The next day was bright and beautiful, and I needed to get away from the news, so we decided to get some chicken and go to the park for a picnic.
We sat between the gazebo and the pond.
Some geese came to visit while we were eating.
When we were finished we walked over the hill to the pond.
The geese and ducks came over and we fed them. When we were out of food we turned and walked away. I glanced back and laughed because I felt like the Pied Piper.
It was good to sit at a picnic table and eat chicken and drink lemonaide outside on a beautiful Autumn day. (Drinking lemonaide outside always seems to relax me and helps me de-stress.)
It was good to feed ducks and laugh at their antics and forget for just one moment all the ugliness in the world.
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