Now that it's August and the baby bats can fly, we've begun the humane removal of our furry friends from the old house where our son Harrison is living, one-half mile down the road.
If you live with a farmer, you understand that my husband Dan considers hiring a bat exterminator to be not only a waste of money but also an insult to his ability to fix anything and everything.
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Step One was to count bats. We needed to determine if the winged mammals exiting at night had increased two- to three-fold since June, which would tell us the babies were now flying out at night rather than waiting hungrily in the attic for their mothers to return.
Everything we read said that if you lock out the mama bats when their babies are still nursing, the babies will crawl into your walls in search of sustenance and create a tenth circle of hell within the walls of your house.
So here we are. After counting 53 bats in June, we saw upwards of 150 on August 2.
Step Two was to try a twine-and-bailing-wire approach. Dan told Harrison to crawl out on the roof in the middle of the night and block off re-entry to the bat hole with a chunk of plywood.
This method did not account for the fact that bats come and go throughout the night: we couldn't tell if bats had reentered prior to Harrison's bleary-eyed escapade onto the roof at 1 a.m. lockdown.
All of the websites that explain (and sell) contraptions to eliminate bats were right.
Step Three was to borrow the neighbor's Bat Valve and rig it up to the hole under the shingles.
Step Four (which should have been Step One) was to order bat houses so that our winged mice will have someplace to rehome. The bat houses will arrive on Friday. We hope until then the bats will rest in trees rather than seek refuge in the neighbor's attic. (We ARE the neighbors!)
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Harrison called at sundown to say the first bats were emerging from the Bat Valve. Dan invited me to join him for a bat-counting date.
I declined.
When he came back an hour later, he was giddy.
"Are you excited about saving $1200 on bat extermination, or the thrill of the hunt?" I asked.
"Thrill of the hunt!" he said happily, then headed to bed.
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This morning I received a note from my dad from his gmail account. This was good news because it meant he had accessed his Google suite on his own.
His short email said my mother had received the book I'd sent and they'd laughed for an hour while reading it. They looked forward to reading it again with my sister's daughter when she came to visit.
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I called later in the afternoon. I thanked my dad for the email and asked if he'd sent it from his laptop or desk computer. (This matters only because I'm trying to determine how/where to best establish remote correspondence.)
"I don't know," he said.
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A little later, I was able--after TOO LONG but before either of us had given up--to log my dad onto Zoom (still no video) and share my screen for another game of FunBridge.
Within minutes, my dad was confidently directing me on bidding, and my mother was chiming in with her own assessment of the hand's value: "I'd count another point on that singleton of diamonds," she said. Neither my dad nor I disagreed.
For twenty minutes we escaped the awkwardness of the child parenting the parent; instead, we immersed ourselves in a conversation of equals. My dad did what we teachers call a "think aloud," explaining the why behind his choices. I, the willing student, asked thoughtful questions and posited my own suggestions.
My mother may have been only a tertiary participant, but she chimed in enough to show she was following the game.
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Before we signed off, I took my computer out onto the deck to tilt my machine's camera toward the wide back yard my parents had grown fond of. I then tilted the camera toward the almost-finished cornfield.
My parents responded gleefully, remembering this space where I had held them for such a precious time.
Enough.
Be well.
Write.
Allison
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