Valley View residents count blessings as they sort through rubble left by deadly tornado

VALLEY VIEW — Amber Lidster, 43, bent down to look inside her white mailbox.

She reached past the door, which was hanging by a hinge, and grabbed two envelopes.

She tore one open.

“My son’s report card,” she said with a laugh before tears welled up in her eyes. “I can’t believe that survived. At least it’s a good one.”

Overnight Saturday, storms spawned tornadoes that killed at least 14 people and injured dozens more in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Lidster’s neighborhood in the rural Cooke County town of Valley View, about 60 miles northwest of Dallas, was in the path of at least one of the tornadoes.

Her home was swept away, leaving behind rubble, pieces of her life.

“I busted my ass for this house the last five years, put the fencing up myself. And as a single mom, to have that all ripped away in a split second is devastating,” she said as she gazed at the place where her house once stood. Her family had owned the property on West Lone Oak Road in Frf Estates since 1984.

Lidster was about 20 miles to the north at WinStar World Casino in Thackerville, Okla., when the storms rolled through her neighborhood. After the tornado hit, neighbors began calling.

They feared the worst — that she was carried off with the house or now lay trapped under debris — and were happy when they found out she was OK. Then they were forced to deliver the news that the home she’d worked so hard to build was gone..

Lidster learned that her daughters, Shailee, 23, and Molly, 21, and son, Daltin, 14, were all safe.

During the car ride home, she tried to prepare herself for what she’d see.

After miraculously finding her yorkie, Glory, and husky-hound-shepherd mix, Ona, mostly unharmed, she turned her attention to what was left of her belongings.

Lidster picked up a Cabbage Patch doll, brushed its hair from its face, and gave it a kiss.

“I’ve had this since I was a kid,” she said. “These are the things that are important to me.”

Among the broken glass in the yard and downed trees with pink insulation caught in their branches, Lidster looked for a Mickey Mouse urn that held her father’s ashes.

As she grew frustrated and discouraged in her search, the light reflecting off a photo on the ground caught her eye.

“It was a picture of my dad’s dad and he was pointing right at me,” she said. “I felt like that was my dad and Pawpaw saying, ‘I got you.’”

At one point early Sunday afternoon, Lidster sat down on the foundation of her former home.

She bowed her head and closed her eyes, before looking at everything around her. Her shoulders fell as the hot sun beat down.

“I found a birth certificate,” Shailee excitedly shouted to her mom, waving it in the air.

“That’s great,” Lidster said, organizing the surrounding chaos.

Besides the sound of pickups and four-wheelers driving along the road, the neighborhood was quiet. Now and then someone would hit their brakes and offer water or call out to see how the family was holding up.

“We’re counting our blessings and what we can be grateful for,” she said. “Sanger and Valley View is amazing and we will always pull together for each other.”

Nearby destruction

Memorial Day weekend traffic crept along Interstate 35 through Denton and Cooke counties. Onlookers gawked at the damage, which could be seen from the main roads.

Dirt and rubble covered some cars and pickups still parked at the pumps of a Shell station, while others were overturned. A skeleton of the building was left as the faint smell of gasoline lingered in the air.

Deeper into the county roads and Valley View’s neighborhoods, families began hanging tarps on destroyed roofs, sawing through downed trees and sorting through what was left.

Certain roads were blocked because of toppled power lines, and flustered loved ones were parking along roads, ditching their cars and hiking through the neighborhoods with water, food and other supplies in tow to get to their people.

Stray dogs roamed the typically hushed streets as horses, goats and cattle grazed in the fields.

On County Road 2313, Linda Jones and her daughter looked at what the tornado had done to her home.

Metal roofing that had come loose in the storm clanked against itself in the wind.

”We seem a lot luckier than others,” Jones, 57, said.

Damage to the property on which they’d lived since 1999 included broken windows and fallen trees and fences.

Linda and her husband had taken cover Saturday night in a storm shelter they built a few years back.

”We were just praying for the whole neighborhood, family and friends,” Jones said.

After the pounding from the rain and wind stopped, they opened the door and checked on their two horses and donkey. The animals were shaken up but OK.

Then, they shifted to thinking about how they could help others.

”My strength and belief in God gets me through this,” Jones said. “God didn’t do this, it was an act of nature. All you can do is say your prayers.”