Night Lights

Something woke me at a quarter to midnight last Thursday night. It wasn't a sound, but a very bright light. I didn't remember turning the motion sensor lights back on, but that didn't mean we hadn't. The light was shining in from the front of the house. Strange. I got out of bed and walked around the house to investigate. We live out in the country, there are no streetlights, or close neighbors. So it was eerie and surprising for things to be so bright. When I looked out the office window I could see that there was a car in our driveway, and it looked to have its high beams on, shining right into the spare bedroom and the office windows. I went back into the bedroom and woke Roger.

"Hey you might want to take a look, there's a car in our driveway shining a bright light right into the house."

He jumped right up, threw on his pants.

robin wakes me.

she says i've got to see this light outside. i go to look. WOW!!!!!!!! there is some kind of large vehicle in our driveway with a VERY BRIGHT SPOTLIGHT shining at our house. the spare bedroom is lit up like daylight. i slide into the room in the slim sliver of unilluminated space by the door to cautiously peek out. i can't see shit for the damn spotlight shining directly at me. the office room right next to the spare bedroom is sheltered from the direct glare by a tree outside. out the window here i can dimly see a vehicle with parking lights on in front of the thing with the BIG LIGHT. this is weird. i am not going out there. "call 911" sez robin. i'm on it!

I said, "Please don't go outside. Call 9-1-1."

the 911 operator asks where i am. i give her my name and address. she sez "that's a deputy sheriff out there arranging for a car to be towed, i'll ask him to turn off the light" and hangs up before i can ask anything further. a minute later the light goes out. okay. it's the deputy out there. but still. why is there a car in our driveway? why is the deputy there? WTF?

What? There's a car that needs to be towed from our house and deputies have come to arrange it? Somehow none of this makes sense, and not just because we had been sleeping and it is the middle of the freakin' night.

The deputy turns off the spotlight. Ah. Now we could see that there are two cars out there with their headlights on.

i turn on the outside lights to show that we're alive in here and venture out to investigate. by now there is a wrecker in the road. the first guy i see isn't in uniform, but what do i know about the local deputies, so i ask "what's going on?" the fellow i asked, who turns out to be the wrecker driver, says something like "drunk driver. we're towing her car away." then the actual deputy, who has been looking through the car itself from the side away from me, looks up and says "oh, this woman tried to hide in your driveway when the other deputy sheriff tried to pull her over for erratic driving. he arrested her for DUI." okay then. my work here is done.

With that information Roger came back into the house. There was still a lot of commotion out there. They decided to drive the car out on to the gravel road that leads to our driveway before they hooked it up to tow away. That was nice of them, I thought, but it still took me quite some time to fall back to sleep.

Later the next day when I had time to think about it, it occurred to me that the deputy should have called us to let us know what was going on right outside our front door. What do you think? I wouldn't have wanted him to knock on the door in the middle of the night, but I think we should have been apprised of what was happening out there rather than waking to this eerie and surreal scene. They were content to shine a spotlight on us and leave us in the dark. That is really not acceptable.