KINGSTON, Wash. (KING) – A Washington state family is counting their blessings that they were not celebrating Thanksgiving last week when a storm brought down a 275-foot tree and split their cabin in half.
A handful of photos is all 14-year-old Jaxon McKelvie has left after a lifetime at the Kingston cabin that has been in his family for 55 years, passed down over three generations.
“This place just means the world to me, so it’s tough to see it like this,” Jaxon said. “It means so much more to me than just a home. It’s the amount of memories that are in these walls.”
During last week’s bomb cyclone, a 275-foot tree fell over four properties, literally splitting the cabin in half. The destruction is staggering.
The towering tree was on a neighbor’s property. Jaxon’s mother, Thyra McKelvie, says in all the time she’s spent at the cabin, she has never seen anyone at that house. No one knew the tree was diseased. She says it was mush where it snapped near the base.
The one fortunate thing is that no one was at the cabin when the tree came crashing through. If the storm had happened one week later, it would have been filled with family celebrating Thanksgiving. The gravity of that is not lost on Jaxon.
“That tree would have gone right through everybody. It’s so hard to think that not only I would be gone but everybody: my grandparents, my uncle and aunt. Everybody would just be gone in a snap like that, and there’s nobody left,” he said.
As the mother and son salvage what little they can from the destruction, they are grateful for their friends, family and all they still have.
“It’s like life means so much more than it did before all this,” Jaxon said.
“We are holding each other tighter, spending more time with one another and just counting our blessings,” his mother said.
The family hopes to rebuild, but they say they’ll clear away a lot of the trees first. Jaxon set up a GoFundMe to help with the process.
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