Sharing this land

These past few months of “settling in” have been wonderful. There’s not much I don’t love about this place. But lest you begin to think that anywhere on earth is perfect, let me interject a blog post about

BATS

I know that I’m supposed to like them because they’ll eat up mosquitos.

But they still kind of freak.me.out.

Right now I have no shutters around the windows on my front porch because we found bat guano beneath them.

Dave deduced that we had bats living in our shutters, so he took the shutters down and he set up a bat house nearby, trying to entice them away from our house and into theirs. They particularly liked one of our shutters, as the accumulated guano will attest.

Who knows when we can put our shutters back.

In case I wanted another reason to dislike them, yesterday morning, Dave went to our back porch, raised the small umbrella        over our small outdoor table and started yelling ( as in being startled and a little traumatized.) He told me to grab my camera; I had just a moment to take a picture of the stunned bat

that had fallen outside into broad sunlight.

I took only one quick pic before it was gone. Moments later, Dave raised the umbrella again, only to have a second bat fly out, this time swooping around both of us, causing both of us to yell in fear. The second one flew away quickly, leaving us with our beating hearts.

So we have bats. They live on our property along with the raccoons and deer and rabbits. As everyone else who has moved from a city has done before me, I will learn, I’m sure, to coexist.