About a Bat, Episode III

That Fall, after we were sure all the bats had left their nest, I steadied the bottom of a very tall ladder as Kurt climbed up and examined the nearly imperceptible gap, filling any potential gaps in the stone with expanding foam. We had spent quite a bit of time researching bats since that evening in August, and while we certainly didn’t mind having a few good bats around, patrolling the evening sky, we weren’t too keen on having them share our indoor living space. See, we couldn’t tell whether the bats had come from the old chimney alone—there were just so many of them—or if they had taken up residence in the old attic, which was no longer in use. So up the ladder went Kurt, battling mild acrophobia, can of expanding foam at the ready.

By this point I had made my imagination crawl with absurd but nonetheless unsettling scenarios of bats flying about the kids’ rooms, hanging from the crib rails, becoming tangled in my daughter’s hair as she slept, getting mixed up in the baskets of stuffed animals. I made myself sick with the thought of guano contaminating onesies and baby blankets. So Kurt, having completed his outdoor assessment, shimmied through the teeny access panel in the ceiling of our son’s closet—and I have to pause here, because the image of a 6’2” man shimmying through a two square foot opening in the ceiling certainly deserves pause—in order to examine the old attic, armed with his can of expanding foam. Problem solved.