Random Story – Was that a Christmas tree?

This is just an odd little story from my life.

I have two routes I can take going to work.  Route A – my preferred way – is about two-thirds on back roads and one-third on a main road.  Route B is about one-third backroads and two-thirds main roads.  There are a couple of reasons I prefer Route A.  For one, I don’t have to drive through the town.  Also, the main road for Route B seems to have more trucks as well as people who apparently need to be somewhere.  But the main reason is that I like driving, but not when there are other cars around.  When I’m driving home – I work 2-10 – there’s usually some traffic on the main roads, but once I turn onto the backroads, I only have to watch for deer.  But Route B is important whenever it snows because I’d rather have two-thirds of my drive be on roads that are plowed and salted than on roads that might not be. 

Anyway, one-time last summer, I drove to work on my normal Route A, but a couple hours later a big thunderstorm rolled in.  Our power blinked a few times, but stayed on.  Once the storm passed, we started getting customers saying that the other side of town had lost power.  Apparently, it’s a different grid section, or whatever.  People also came in saying power was out along the Route B main road. 

When it came time to go home, I decided to go Route B because with every storm there are branches knocked down and there’s a heavily wooded area on Route A.  There are wooded areas on Route B, but not as much and those roads are more trafficked.  I didn’t feel like having to stop to clear branches from the road.  I also wanted to see how far out the power was out, and wondered if it would be out at home.

So I started home and got to the blackout area of town, which was a bit weird.  But then going out Route B was even weirder.  It’s not heavily populated, but there’s usually at least one house in view at any one time, and about half have a light of some kind on, but this night it was all darkness. 

And then, about half-a-mile from the turn on to the backroads to get home, there was a house with lights on.  I don’t think we lost power at home, so I think I just crossed into a different grid section. 

This house is situated a bit off the road, but it was the first lights I’d seen in miles, so I looked at it closer than normal.  I’ll admit, there is a part of me that is curious about how other people live.  Like, I’d love to go into my old apartments to see how people furnished them.  Oh, they put the couch there?  Interesting.  I’ll admit to having some curiosity, but I’m not a voyeur who looks through people’s windows.  But for this house, I could see into what I guess would be their living room, and I thought I saw a Christmas tree.  I forget exactly when this was, but it had to have been May or June.  And I only had a split second of looking through a window of a house set back from the road, so it is possible I saw some random shapes that my brain just interpreted as a Christmas tree.  But it left me wondering about it for the rest of the night.

Maybe a week or so later, I was running some errands one afternoon and going home the same way.  So I had to look.  Just to see if it was a Christmas tree or what.  Unfortunately, they had the blinds down and I didn’t see anything. 

There were several nights this winter I took Route B home, but I don’t think I ever looked to see if they had a Christmas tree in that room.  Not because I forgot about it – I still think of it as The Christmas Tree(?) House – but because most of the nights I drove home that way it was snowing, and I had more important things to do than to see where these people I’ve never met put their tree.  Or why they’d keep it up year-round.