Story: Duke's Lonesome Pine

A pine tree that does not look like the one in the story.

For those readers coming here looking for Triempery stories.... this is not one.

I wrote this short story for a family newsletter. It's cute and it's seasonal, and so I'm sharing it with my fans.

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            One summer afternoon as her husband guided their shiny new car onto the highway, Diane’s gaze skipped across the intersection to the parking lot of Duke’s Pet Goodies and Automotive Repair. She liked the view of the pretty hill rising behind the old stone-walled shop.  But what was that? 

            At the back corner of the lot, framed by a vista of lovely old maples and oaks, stood an affront to nature so glaring she couldn’t miss it in a million years. No one could. 

            Whatever it was didn’t look like a tree, although Diane could tell it was supposed to.  Twice as tall as its neighbors, it resembled a giant green bottle brush. Vaguely coniferous branches of equal length stuck out all around a uniform brown trunk and incongruous pine cones poked up at regular intervals like squat candles. How she had never seen it before escaped her.

            “I can't believe it!” she exclaimed to Lester. Her husband apparently hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, because he simply kept driving. She turned in her seat just to stare out the rear window at the eyesore. “Did you see that hideous thing? Is that new?”

            “See what?”

            “That thing at Duke’s. The one that looks like a utility pole someone tried to dress up like a tree. I’ve never seen anything so ugly.”

            Lester’s eyebrows raised a notch. ‘You said that about the Zamboni’s gazebo. But they

landscaped it, and put up a nice fence, and now it fits right in.”

            “It’s still ugly. And that thing—” she faced forward again, “—will never fit in.  Anywhere.”

            “I’m sure Duke’s just trying to fix up the place. He can’t possibly be a young man anymore. Might be looking to sell.”

            “With that on the property? He’s out of his mind.”

            She turned to gaze out the side window. Cobb’s Crossing, lazy and rural just a few years ago, was undergoing a metamorphosis. Starting twenty years ago, there had been a gradual influx of families fleeing the dirt and crime of the city, building sprawling homes on five acre lots.  Within the last five years, the trickle had become a flood, a blight of subdivisions thrown up by developers, with cookie-cutter houses that sold for ten times what she and Lester had paid for their modest rancher.

            Diane sighed. While she liked the town’s new boutiques and shops, most were a bit too pricey and clever. She’d been perfectly comfortable with the cozy old Clover store, before a strip mall had replaced it and several other businesses on that stretch of Route 10. Even the Friendly Family Food store had been replaced by a SuperGrocer. The growth had been good for business, though. Her one-woman travel agency, located in a white-paned storefront on Main Street, was prospering.

            It saddened her to think Duke might sell his business. Duke’s Pet Goodies and Automotive Repair had been on that corner of the highway since she was a girl. No one could remember what had been there before. Even the earliest photos from the archives in the Cobb’s Crossing Historical Center showed a rough-hewn stone and frame building much like the current one, with a hitching post out front and a painted sign that said “Duke’s Store.”

            She would talk with him. Yes, that was what she would do. She bought dog kibble there sometimes. Of course, she'd never actually met Duke, just the store’s lone clerk, a pale, round-faced person of confusing age and gender, whom she had once called “Ma’am” but still didn’t know if she’d done so correctly. She, or he, seemed to handle the pet end of things. Duke undoubtedly worked in the garage. Yes, that was it. He always had his head under a hood or poking around underneath some car and might not even know he had a hideous . . . pine standing smack in the corner of his lot.

            Two days later Diane parked her SUV on the gravel lot and strode into the Pet Goodies side of Duke’s business. Sounds coming from the adjoining garage told her the Automotive Repair operation was open. One of the business’s usual nondescript customers stood at the checkout, talking with the sandy-haired clerk, so Diane took several minutes to wander the long, disorganized aisles, perusing the selection of pet paraphernalia. Duke’s sold only accessories and food and the like. No fish tanks crowded the back wall, no screeching birds or barking pups.  The place smelled of pet food and plastic.

            When the customer left, Diane made her way to the counter. The clerk appraised her expectantly. She scanned for a name tag and found it. Pat.

            “Pat, I want to talk to you about your tree.”

            “Our what?”

            “Tree. The one at the back of your lot. The new one.” 

            Pat paused for only a moment, then shrugged. “The old one died.”

            Diane didn’t even remember another tree having been there. If indeed there had been a precursor, it had looked completely normal.

            “If you’re lucky, this one will too.”

            Half-moon brows lifted, round eyes fixed on her in surprise. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

            “In case you haven’t noticed, your tree is butt ugly. This is a nice community and—”

            “We’ve had absolutely no complaints about the tree.”

            “Well, you have now.” Diane picked up a foil packet of dried liver treats and counted out a bill and change for payment. “You really should do something about it. I’m on the Cobb’s Crossing Beautification Committee and, I’m sorry to say, that tree’s not beautiful.” 

            “Neither are most of the people in town, but we accept them anyway.”

            “That’s different!” She felt her cheeks flush as she avoided looking at the disturbingly soft-featured clerk. “I know a thing or two about pines, you know. I personally chose this year’s town Christmas tree! I’d like to speak with Duke.”

            “Might be hard to do.” Pat snapped open a small brown paper bag and slid Diane’s purchase into it. “Put the last Duke to sleep couple of years ago.”

            "Put to sleep?"

            The bag slid across the counter toward her. “Duke was the old man’s dog. Gave that name to every dog he ever owned. Died himself about ten years back.”

            “Then you—”

            “I don’t own the store. Just work here.”

            “But someone must own the place.”

            “The new owners are from out of town.”

         “Did you know there’s no Duke?” Diane asked Lester the next weekend as they drove out on Route 10.  

            “No?” 

            “Guy named the store after his dog.”

            Lester smiled. “Sounds fair enough. Now we know.”

            “Sounds like a story to me.” Diane frowned as they neared the crest of the hill. Sure enough, as soon as they headed down the other side, there it was. The tree. Its perfectly symmetrical limbs and ruler-straight profile taunted her. “Stop the car!” she demanded. Grabbing her handbag from the floor of the car, she pulled out her phone. 

            “What? Why?”

            “I want a picture!”

            “I thought you said it was ugly?”

            “It is. But I need a picture if I’m going to take this matter to the committee.”

            “Like you did the Zamboni’s gazebo?” Lester turned into the lot. Gravel crunched under the tires as he drove around the shop to give Diane a better shot through the window. “You realize they’re still not talking to us, don’t you?”

            Diane angled her arms out the window and squinted, pivoting the camera until the view screen showed the entire crown of the hideous pine. She took three pictures, just in case. “This is far more offensive than the Zamboni’s gazebo,” she assured her husband. Nodding that she was done, she tucked the phone triumphantly back into her purse. “More offensive by far!”

      Although Lester just blamed it on the digital camera’s unfathomable settings, Diane could not deny the evidence displayed in the photos. In all three, the tree was not only ugly but appeared cocooned in a nimbus of light. Faint voodoo streamers of purple and pink flickered around the top of the tree and its strange, symmetrical cones.

            The next morning, Diane marched into Duke’s Pet Goodies, armed with her proof.

            She slapped a printout of one of the images onto the counter. “What’s it doing?"

            Pat picked up the picture and held it in front of her, or his, pointy nose, studying it with large, watery eyes. “Looks to me like someone’s camera needs fixing.”

            “It’s not the camera. All of the other pictures turned out fine. All of the other trees turned out fine. See?” She pointed to a lovely beech at the forefront of the vanguard of trees on the hill behind the offending pine. “That one’s not glowing.”

            “I can see that.”

            “So why is this one?”

            “I’ve no idea.” Pat regarded her placidly. “What do you think’s the reason?”

            “I don’t know the reason. I only know that this—” she jabbed her finger at the image in the picture “—is not a tree. It’s too ugly to be a tree. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that looks less like a tree.” She reached for a bag of jerky strips. Maddox, her fox terrier, liked jerky strips. “We have zoning laws, you know. Do you have a permit for this . . . fabrication?”

            “Duke’s is a business. We need a permit for the fence, the utility shed, and the storage and disposal of chemicals. We need a permit for the garage, and a permit for a dumpster. We don’t need a permit for a tree.”

            Diane scowled, resenting Pat’s laundry list of transparent evasions. The clerk, or someone, had to know something. It was definitely time to bring this matter to the committee.

      “But Diane dear, I don’t know what result you want.” Eloise Betzberger turned the corner of the new Town Hall atrium. The impatient staccato of her stiletto heels punctuated the echoing, open space. “I consulted with Public Works and got an opinion from the Town Board. Cobb’s Crossing has ordinances for driveways and siding and fences and what kind of antenna you can put on your roof, though no one does that anymore. It’s all satellite dishes and streaming.” She tugged sunglasses from a slim embroidered case and snapped them onto her glasses. “The man has a right to put whatever kind of tree he wants onto his property, as long as it’s not a noxious weed.”

            “But it might as well be a weed. A giant, ugly weed.”

            “It looks like a pine. There’s nothing illegal about a pine.”

            “But the picture—”

            “You mean the one you took, that made it look demonic?” Eloise sighed. “Nanci and Aliette both drove out to Duke’s just to see if it could possibly be right out of Amityville, but—”

            “They agreed it’s ugly!”

            “And if it were on the boulevard we could do something about it. But the tree’s on private property. That’s why we wrote a letter suggesting the owner do whatever they can to make it more attractive.” Eloise smiled her perfect smile, the one that won the hearts of zoning planners and opened the purses of foundation chairpersons. Her husband, the dentist, had put a lot of work into that particular asset. “Keep it in perspective, Di. Right now, people are more concerned about public works putting in those ugly yellow street lamps along Mill Road! Those things look like they belong in a prison yard!”

            They parted ways in the parking lot. In her SUV, Diane leaned her head back in frustration. She wondered why she bothered. To the Town Board, Duke’s Pet Goodies and Automotive Repair was just a run-down business on the edge of town, on a highway already blighted by machine shops, public storage, and auto dealerships. They probably just wished it would go away. They much preferred the Beautification Committee to spend its energy on decorations for the upcoming Holiday Festival.

            That evening she took out an envelope and addressed it to the F.B.I. and another to her congressman, tucking a copy of the picture into each. Months later, after hearing nothing, Diane realized she’d probably been written off as a kook and resolved to simply let the matter go.

       On the last week in October, Diane and Lester left Cobb’s Crossing to visit his sister, taking Route 10 for the first time in two months. There, ahead of them just after they'd crested the hill, the pine blazed with autumn red. It stood upright in Duke’s parking lot like a gigantic fox’s tail.

            “Oh . . . my . . . God!” Diane shrieked. “Pull in, now!”

            “Maddox could use another toy, I suppose,” Lester grumbled. He turned the car into the lot.

            “And some liver treats, too. Would you just look at that thing?” The car had barely stopped before Diane flung the door open and dashed across the gravel to the shop. The screen door banged behind her. 

            Once inside, she railed at Pat the moment he, or she, came out from a door at the back of the shop. “What have you done? Now it looks like an angry coat rack!”

            Pat studied her with mild blue eyes. “Guess it thought it would be less offensive if it blended with the other trees.”

            “It doesn’t blend.”

            “I see.”

            “It looks all wrong. Because it’s not a tree.”

            “But it is a tree, and it’s trying to fit in. It’s trying very hard. It’s really very sensitive. Why don’t you just accept it the way it is? Other people have.” Pat regarded her hopefully.

            “Are you telling me that no one else has complained about its appearance?”

            “No one.”

            All Diane could manage was a mighty sigh, the biggest of sighs, signaling defeat on a scale that would have satisfied the Great Khan were he still in the business of ravaging entire continents. If she couldn’t beat this scourge, perhaps she might still get a few answers by going along with the charade. “Come outside,” she directed. With no other customers in the store, the time was as right as it ever would be. 

            The screen door clattered shut behind them as Diane led Pat around the corner of the shop and pointed at the scarlet abomination. “The color, for one thing, is all wrong. You want it to look like a tree? At least get the color right. Pine trees are evergreens, and evergreens are . . . green.”

            “Yes, I know that. I’m from around these parts. But the tree, you see—”

            “The tree doesn’t choose its own color.”

            “I’m afraid this one does.”

            Diane blinked. Pat looked like he, or she, actually believed that. “That’s ridiculous,” she said.

            “I told you... it wants to fit in, look like the other trees.”

            “But it doesn’t even know what the other trees look like!” A quick survey of the hill behind Duke’s place and the nearby, sometimes swampy field where Wooden’s Creek ran, revealed only maples and beeches, blazing with oranges, and tall crimson oaks. With the drought they’d been having, the colors were especially bright.

            “Seems it does. Started out this spring green as young grass, and it was dark green all summer.”  

            Another vehicle pulled into the lot, a pickup truck, tires crunching gravel. It parked beside where Lester still sat behind his compact car’s wheel, reading something, perhaps one of the books they were taking to his sister’s.

            Pat started to walk back, but Diane put out a hand. “Please wait,” she entreated. “When did you get this tree?”

            Keeping an eye on the lumpish man and woman who’d just gotten out of the pickup and were walking toward the shop, Pat said, “Men came by and planted it last fall. Can’t tell you more than that, Ms.—” 

            She provided her name. “Ormson. Diane Ormson. Mrs.”

            “Owners sent them. They planted it, not much taller than they were. Said it wouldn’t be extra work, because the plant would take care of itself and whatever it couldn’t take care of, they would. And that’s all I know. Now, excuse me.”

            “Of course.” Diane watched Pat walk back around the corner until she heard the screen door snap shut again, then turned to look again at the pine. The brown trunk, crinkled and scored, sprouted limbs bristling with spiky scarlet tufts and fans.

            It was not a tree, she concluded yet again. It couldn’t be. Evergreens didn’t change color from green to red, not even in autumn. And pine trees didn’t grow fifty feet in just one year. No tree did. 

            Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she stalked toward the object of her fury. A wide swath of stones, pale gray and dun, no doubt scooped from some local riverbed, covered the ground ten feet out from the sturdy trunk. The stones rolled beneath her soles as she stepped onto them.

            “You’re not a tree!” she shouted up at the towering insult. “You can fool everyone else in this town, but not me! You’re programmed to look like a tree, are you? Hah! I’ve seen electrical towers that look more like a tree than you. Is that what you are? Some damn fancy cellular tower they’re not telling us about?”

            Behind her a car door slammed. Diane was still glaring at the pine when Lester appeared at her side. 

            “Why are you yelling at a tree?”

            “It’s not a tree! Look at it, really look at it, and tell me you still think so.”

            Lester stepped back once and craned his neck, eyelids thoughtfully narrowed, hands on his hips. He gave it a full minute before reaching his conclusion. “It is rather odd-looking.”

            “Of course it is,” she said, glad another person at last could see it. “I think it’s a new kind of communications tower. Remember the one that the Navy wanted to build on Cutter’s Hill, that the town voted down two years ago? So what happens a year later? This shows up!"

            “A communications tower for submarines, disguised as a tree?”

            "Pretty sneaky, don’t you think? Except the think tank idiots who created it only paid lip service to making sure it actually looked like a tree.” Turning her back on her nemesis, Diane flashed her husband a triumphant smile. “I’m taking this to the town board!”

      Diane didn’t learn until the Monday before the town board meeting that the item she had brow-beaten her councilman into submitting to the board was not on the agenda. When she inquired further, she learned that no record existed, not in her councilman’s office nor in the council files, of her complaint. No one knew anything, or wanted to know anything, about the unusual pine tree on the lot of Duke’s Pet Goodies and Automotive Repair. 

            “What do you mean, nothing about it?” she challenged Tammy, the council president’s secretary. “I’ve only been complaining about it for weeks.”

            “Maybe someone decided it was a matter for Public Works,” Tammy suggested. The woman’s serene smile was innocent of any useful knowledge. “People often start in the wrong place. Or maybe the matter went to Parks.”

            “It’s not even a real tree. I’m sure Parks isn’t interested,” Diane snapped. She knew buck-passing when she saw it. “And I’m quite sure Public Works is too busy accepting kickbacks from waste management companies to care.” The real question, of course, was who was taking kickbacks for the ridiculous pine communications tower, and from whom.

            “I can leave a message for your councilman,” the secretary offered.

            “You do that.”

            “I’ll bring it to Roger’s attention, of course."

            "Of course," Diane said. Roger Kleintauer was the town president, freshly elected just the year before and about as useful as a head cold.

            Dismayed and frustrated, she walked out of the new town center and reached for her sunglasses against the midday glare. She made a point of driving down Route 10 on her way home, slowing through a construction zone reeking with fumes. Two stop lights later, she swung her SUV into the parking lot of Duke’s Pet Goodies. The Automotive Repair side of the shop had its garage door open, a car up on the rack with someone puttering beneath it. At first she thought it was Pat, for the person had the same pale round-headed look, until the man turned and she saw his thin-lipped mouth and soft, slightly protruding eyes. She gave a friendly wave, but he simply turned back to his work.

            Fairly certain Pat would be indoors, ringing up sales to the occupants of one of the two cars parked in front, Diane parked at the end of the row, out of sight of the garage and the shop’s front window. She got out of her car, then made a point of rummaging in her purse when the shop door opened and a customer ambled out. Carrying a large paper sack, the short, thick-set woman entered a silver mini-van and the engine rumbled to life. With a crunch of gravel, the van rolled past Diane on its way off the lot, then turned onto the highway going north.

            Confident of not being watched, Diane approached the tree. This time she marched right up to it. She extended her right hand, laid her fingertips on the brown surface. To her amazement, what she felt wasn’t cool textured metal, but warm, fissured wood. Real wood. Looking closer, she scrutinized ridges and furrows that looked roughly like bark. Unconcerned about her freshly manicured nails, she picked at what looked like a vulnerable spot and flicked off a chip. She examined it, then snapped it between her fingers and held it to her nose. It smelled like a freshly cleaned kitchen.

            It was a tree. A pine, of some sort. A pine that changed colors with the seasons.

            She stared up the trunk, into the crown of that towering pole topped with spokes of fire-red needles. Shadowy ovoid cones looking to be the size of footballs poised incongruously on unbowed branches. Nothing about it resembled any tree she had ever seen.

            It was only because she dropped the piece of bark and wanted to pick it up again, to show it to Lester and ask if their neighbor, who worked at the university, might give it to someone there to analyze, that Diane caught the spark of something metallic just above ground level. A small plate of bluish metal, engraved with a few wiggly odd lines and angles that might be numbers, glinted beneath a coating of hardened yellow sap. It reminded her of patent tags she’d seen attached to plants used by landscapers during the town hall renovation.

            Diane stepped back, perplexed.

            If this pine wasn’t a cell phone tower, if it really was alive, maybe it was one of those forestry experiments people like her only heard about on television, if they heard about them at all. She often saw new cultivars advertised in catalogs, accompanied by blurbs like: “A multiflora beauty with a sassy fragrance and a red that stays true from start to finish.” This pine looked too homely to be something in a catalog. Diane couldn’t see it ever amounting to anything more than a utility pole. 

            Indeed, now that she studied it in this new light, the less angry she felt. It was only a tree after all. Not a grand offense or corporate subterfuge worthy of all her tilting. Just a lonely, ugly tree. A freak of nature, albeit helped along that path by scientists. Suddenly she was angry at them, not it.

            She laid her hand on the bark again, as if she could somehow grant it absolution. “It’s not your fault,” she whispered. “Your red color’s very pretty, but it’s all wrong for you, you know.  You look much better in green.” 

            Something cool, yet also somehow warm, infused her hand. If she didn't know better, she would have considered it a response. 

            As Diane walked back to her SUV, she felt the burden of good citizenry. The community deserved to know it had this freakish tree in their midst—in the rear lot of Duke’s Pet Goodies and Automotive Repair, to be precise—near several large developments and only a stone’s throw from the business district. The town’s upscale image couldn’t possibly abide it. What if this rogue reject seeded the neighborhood? Beyond being ugly, besides being a pine that changed color like a maple, the tree grew incredibly fast. And the huge, ungainly cones, surely, must pose a safety hazard, even though the tree was far from the street. She had an obligation, as a concerned citizen and member of the Cobb’s Crossing beautification committee, to raise the matter. Didn’t she?

            It wasn’t like she hadn’t been trying. Diane sighed as she slid behind the wheel, glancing at the pine one more time as she put the car in gear.

          She and Lester passed the pine again a week later on the way to Lancaster to buy pepper jam. The familiar bottle-brush shape reared at the back of Duke’s lot, a vivid green exclamation point against a clear blue sky.

            “Pull in!” Diane demanded. Lester did so without comment, even pulling around to the side of the store so she would be nearer the tree.

            “Well?” he asked.

            “It’s not red anymore.”

            “But that’s what you wanted.”

            “I know. Have you ever known a tree to comply with a request?”

            “I didn’t realize you’d spoken to it.”

            Of course not. Diane hadn’t told him about that, only about the fleck of bark and the metal plate. The number on the plate had turned up nothing, just an environmental patent of some sort about which no other information could be gathered. Snapping open the door, she got out of the car and once more approached the towering flora. It was green, sure enough, as a pine should be, but it still didn't look quite . . . right. It looked thin and stretched. A gust of wind teased the branches, sending red and gold leaves dancing off the neighboring maples and beeches—and a swirl of verdant needles off the pine.

            “No, no!” Diane cried. Arms waving, she darted toward the tree. “What are you doing? Pines don’t shed their leaves! Stop that right now!” Ignoring Lester, who had opened his own door and now stood beside the car, staring after her in bewilderment, she beat her hands against the trunk. At long last she left them there, palms resting flat on the rough surface. The barest swell of vibrations rippled wavelike beneath her fingertips, suffusing her skin, then her entire body with sensation, as though she were inside a tail-wagging puppy. With a sigh, she pressed her face to the broad expanse of sun-warmed ridges.  

            However silly she knew it to be, Diane felt the tree was trying to tell her something.

            Clearly, the pine did have some kind of mind of its own, albeit a very simple and easily influenced one. The shop clerk’s opinion that the tree was just trying to fit in now made ridiculous sense. It had, after all, turned green again after her last scolding of it.

            “You must stop mimicking the other trees,” she said firmly. The energy tracing her skin flickered, its tickling pulses intermittent. “You are a pine. An evergreen. Your crown should be green and lush and tapered, not scraggly and certainly not straight up and down like a bottle brush.” She focused with every bit of her imagination on a mental image of the prettiest evergreen she had ever seen, a majestic spruce presiding over the ice rink at Rockefeller Center in New York City. She and Lester had skated at the foot of that fine specimen only twenty years ago. It had been Christmas time and snowing. “Can you see that? How nice and tapered that tree is? That’s a much better shape for you.”

            She would return tomorrow with a picture.

            Walking back to the car a minute later, having regained the better part of her composure, Diane found Lester talking to Pat. Pat’s head tilted slightly to the right while watching her approach. 

            “What was she doing?” Pat asked Lester.

            “Talking to your tree,” her husband said.

            “I’m sorry,” Diane said, joining them. “The color change caught me by surprise.”

            “Us, too. Been doing that quite a bit lately.”

            “It’s still unattractive, you know. But it’s getting better. It’s definitely the most . . . frenetic tree I’ve ever seen.”

            A smile tugged at Pat’s lips. “Trees are a quiet lot, by and large. Guess this one has ambitions.”

            “Yes, well, it’s not out of the woods yet. If it loses any more needles, I’ll have to call the Department of Forestry on it! We can’t have a pine shedding needles from some tree version of mange.” Dusting off her hands, Diane gave Lester the look that said they should be going. In truth, she was a little embarrassed getting caught talking to a tree. And it really still was an ugly troll of a pine. Cobb’s Crossing’s beautification effort would improve tenfold if she did call the Department of Forestry.

         Though preparing for the Holiday Festival took up much of her time, and the holiday season meant increased hours at her office, Diane found reasons to stop by Duke’s on her trips about town. She swung by one afternoon on her way to drop off a package of cruise tickets for the Armbrusters’ annual vacation. Pat and three equally odd-looking co-workers from the automobile repair side of the business made her welcome. They invited her into the garage, where they cleaned off a chair beside a three-legged table and served her hot chocolate, which she stoically sipped from a cracked, stained teacup. The next day, Diane brought them a tin of home-baked cookies and two jars of her award-winning preserves. As she left the building, she stopped for a moment to touch the pine and smile. Even she had to admit the tree was looking much better. It had stopped dropping needles, for one thing, and was slowly assuming a more flattering shade of green. She took full credit, having painted that color on the entire outside back wall of Duke’s garage.

            She never did call the Department of Forestry.

            She did, however, call Hoofnagel’s Acres of Trees to make final arrangements for the town Christmas tree being delivered that week. As a member of the Beautification Committee, she was standing beside Eloise when the flatbed delivered the tree and a crane lifted it into place in front of Town Hall. She stood at the podium along with Roger Kleintauer the night the tree was lit, its perfect shape enrobed in light and casting a festive glow upon the townspeople gathered in the square. Cobb’s Crossing, its streets and shops festooned with dainty white bulbs, could not have been more beautiful. Diane took a picture of the holiday tree and packed a box with some lights and decorations for which the committee had found no other use.

            Pat’s co-workers were busy in the garage. The sharp ringing of tools pounding on metal filtered across the freezing air as she opened the door to the shop. She located Pat hauling bags of dog kibble from the back room.

            “I notice Duke’s never puts up Christmas lights.”

            Pat slid the heavy bag onto a stack of others just like it. “Good reason for that. We don’t observe that holiday.”

            “None of you?”

            “Nope.”

            Diane frowned. Every year, it seemed, she ran into a few shopkeepers who had to make things difficult. “Well, a few lights never hurt anything. In the case of this establishment, they’d only do good. Even the public storage facility next door put up a snowman and some nice icicle lights. They look cheerful and seasonal.”

            Pat shrugged. “We don’t mind being different.”

            The door slammed and a pudgy man wearing a down coat that made him look like a blowfish appeared at the counter to wave in their direction, head cocked expectantly. 

            “Customer,” Pat said. 

            Diane refused to admit defeat. Duke’s would look cute if the owners just paid a little more attention to its appearance. “I left you a box of lights and things should you change your mind.”

            Upon exiting the shop, she rummaged for a minute in her car trunk, then wandered around to the back of the parking lot. The pine still looked like a tree farm refugee, a green-tipped rustic scepter rising above a rundown kingdom of fools.

            “They don’t understand,” she muttered against the winter chill. Twilight was fast fading to full night. She smelled snow in the air. “Is it really so much to expect people to show a little pride in their community?”

            Using wire, she affixed three big red velvet bows in a line down the pine’s towering bare lower trunk, then draped a few loops of garland around it to complete the effect. Pat and her, or his, gnomish co-workers just might take it down in the morning, but at least Diane had made one small stand against the place’s ugliness. Diane’s bare fingers rested lightly against the pine’s rough, barky skin. As always, a warm feeling of well-being suffused her—the tree’s or her own satisfaction with it, she couldn’t be sure. She smiled and rummaged in her coat pocket, pulling out the picture she’d taken. She displayed it, hushing the inner voice that told her a pine tree had no eyes. She beamed at the photographic proof of her accomplishment.   

            “This is the town Christmas tree. I picked it out myself,” she said. “All I really want for this town is to make it pretty. How shallow is that? But with this tree, I succeeded. See how beautiful it is?” Before leaving, she touched one of the velvet bows she’d tied about the pine’s homely middle. “At least I was able to dress you up a bit.”

            The snow storm hit the Sunday before Christmas, hours of fierce wind breaking trees and bringing down power lines while encasing Cobb’s Crossing in several inches of impenetrable white ice. Fallen branches littered the streets. Along Main Street, skeins of unmoored lighting snaked from street lamps and storefronts. Even had there been electricity, all the displays were damaged or ruined. The big tree in the square tilted, a battered derelict, several big branches on one side snapped from heavy ice. Diane surveyed the damage on a trip into town to check on the condition of her agency. The clever wreath from her door, with plastic bells rigged to chime “Silver Bells” when someone entered the office, lay frozen in a snowdrift. 

            Although the power company worked around the clock to restore power, Cobb’s Crossing and its clusters of new subdivisions languished in the cold. As night approached, people left the town in droves, headed to hotels or the warmer houses of nearby relatives. Although heartsick that the town’s Holiday Festival would have to be cancelled, Diane gave thanks that her house, at least, had a generator, a rumbling old beast of a machine that Lester had stubbornly maintained over the years.

            Diane was in the living room, cherishing a single lamp and nursing a hot pot of soup, when a rapid banging on the front door shook the house from foundation to roof. Thinking there was an emergency, she flung open the door to see Eloise Betzberger, holding a flashlight and wearing a fur-trimmed leather coat, looking for all the world like she’d stepped out from a detective novel. 

            “Get your coat!” Eloise commanded.

            “For goodness sake, come inside. All the warm air’s escaping!” Diane grasped a handful of Eloise’s coat and hauled her into the tiny foyer.

            Lester chose that moment to come in from the kitchen. “Is there a problem?”

            Diane grabbed her parka from the hall closet. “Eloise says I need to come with her.”

            Eloise looked like an alarmed raccoon. “The other committee members have left town.  Bob and I are staying at the hospital until the power comes back. That’s where I saw it. You can see it from the top floor.”

            “See what?” Diane’s heart sank.

            “Stop dilly-dallying.”

            “Wait a minute while I turn down the heat,” Lester said. A minute later, the three of them piled into Eloise’s monster of a vehicle. Between layers of warm outerwear and the plush upholstery of a heated bucket seat, Diane felt like she was riding in some kind of suburban womb.

            The roads were treacherous, ice-covered and unlighted. Surprisingly, a line of other cars kept them company, creeping single file along Gradyville Road toward Rte. 10. 

            “Oh no,” Diane said, realizing the way they were headed. She turned her gaze toward the crest of the hill the vehicle was arduously climbing. A luminous haze seemed to crown the road ahead.

            “The electric company tracked me down at the hospital. Someone at Duke’s told them you were on the beautification committee and one of the men remembered I was on it.”

            “And I have an aunt who plays the guitar. What has that got to do with anything?”

            “Apparently they think it has something to do with . . . that.” Eloise’s big SUV topped the hill and began the downhill trek toward the highway. A single pillar of brilliant light stood just off the intersection where Duke’s Pet Goodies and Automotive Repair huddled otherwise in darkness. 

            At the back of the lot, the pine rose in a solitary, illuminated spire. It was not quite broad enough at the base, and not quite tapered enough at the tip, but it had achieved at least some resemblance to a conifer. Every spiky branch, every oversized cone, glittered with laser bright pinpoints of luminescence, as though the entire tree had sprouted diamonds—and emeralds, opals and rubies. It shone in defiance of the dark for miles around.

            Diane clapped her gloved hands to her face, muffling her surprise. 

            Dozens of other cars filled the lot. So did power company trucks. In the glare of headlights from a ring of vehicles, Pat was surrounded by yellow-suited workers. One tall man wearing a hard hat stood nearby, arms folded. Another shorter and broader man talked into a field radio.  Diane rushed over, taking care on the unplowed lot.

            “I should have guessed an auto shop would have a generator,” she said.

            Pat turned to look at her with puzzlement. “We don’t. That’s what I’ve been telling these men. There’s no electricity going to our tree. We never strung any lights.”

            The short man with the radio, his heavy jaw sporting a full growth of dark stubble, snapped at the distressed shopkeeper. “Trees don’t deck themselves in boughs of holly, and they sure as death and taxes don’t light up without electricity!”

            Pat looked only like she, or he, wanted everyone to leave. “Someone gave this one ideas.”

            “Oh, leave him . . . her alone,” Diane interceded. “What’s all the fuss? This tree is lovely!”

            “Ma’am,” the tall man said, “he’s telling the truth. There’s no electrical line to this tree, no juice.”

            “Oh, who cares?” Diane dismissed him with a wave of her gloved hand. 

            She pushed her way through the gathered townspeople, past wide-eyed Eloise and grinning Lester and a trio of snowmobilers just arrived from one of the surrounding subdivisions.  So many people, all standing rapt, necks craned as they looked up in wonder at the glowing crown of Duke’s amazing pine tree. Maybe in the morning the F.B.I. and the Department of Forestry would finally descend upon it as they should have weeks ago. Or maybe whatever shadowy authority had protected the tree from her attempts to get rid of it would step in yet again. None of that really mattered at this moment. Diane didn’t care if she was looking upon magic, or some accident of tree breeding gone wild, or even if something alien had taken root at the edge of the parking lot of Duke’s Pet Goodies and Automotive Repair.

            For the first time since Diane had laid eyes on it, her tree fit in. Perfectly.