I was resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t be going home this Thanksgiving. Tickets to fly home were too expensive, flying standby would have been impossible and I definitely did not want to drive twelve hours home and turn around a day later to drive twelve hours back. However, a rare series of events took place propelling me to change my plans. Here’s what happened:

In July my mom drove to Atlanta to drop off my grandma at the airport. It was late at night when my mom drove back home, she rode along on a desolate two lane road in south Georgia and suddenly came upon a flock of turkey vultures. As I understand from her side of the story, the turkey vultures were in the middle of the road and my mom did not have enough time to slow down. She honked the horn and pressed the break, but the birds were in her direct path. She traveled at over seventy miles per hour and as she approached the turkeys, she claims to have seen their doe-eyed look of shock. There was no way to dodge it, they hit her windshield and bam! The windshield shattered into a thousand little pieces of safety glass. Even though I heard the story the day after, I can just hear my mom scream and see the black feathers fly.

My mom ended up waiting hours for a tow, but she made it home safely, unhurt and with an amusing story to share. That fiasco took place at the end of July and the car sat in the parking lot of the auto shop for five months. It took that long for the special windshield to be made and then shipped down south to us. When Thanksgiving began approaching, my mom really hoped the car would be ready. Only a few days before Thursday, we received the phone call. The car was ready and my mom, who moved back to our hometown of Washington D.C. two months ago, asked for my sister and I to drive it home.

I was resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t be going home this Thanksgiving. This would have been the first holiday away from my mom and as a mere college freshman, that means a lot to me. At first when we received the phone call telling us the car was ready, I was upset. I’m not a fan of long road trips and I already convinced myself that staying at school for the holiday would be fun. However, my mom needed her car. So we packed up the car, left after the last class on Tuesday and drove throughout the night, up I-95. At each pit-stop, the air felt colder and the gas station coffee was brewed stronger. Despite the last minute change in plans and the long haul up north, I really enjoyed seeing my mom for Thanksgiving. Saying goodbye at the airport was difficult, but not as bad as when I said goodbye at the beginning of the semester. Perhaps I was hesitant to see my mom because I knew saying goodbye would be hard. Nevertheless, seeing her, even for forty eight hours, was worth the drive and a few tears at the end. My mom got her car and I realized that in the future, I should do all I can to go home during the holidays. I grew so accustomed to my life at college that I lost the desire to go home, but after visiting, I realize that there’s really no place like home.