So, Thanksgiving. Julia's and my first chance to return to our childhood home, hang out with family, eat too many roasted root vegetables and relax around the fire. Having taken care of the first three, we were working on the fourth, dreamily discussing the economy as the fire burned down to a pile of glowing coals.And then Julia, who was sitting next to me on the sofa, started screaming and wouldn't stop. She was sort of clutching at me and crawling up the couch as she screamed, and my parents, uncle and I all stared at her in confusion. Then my mother (whose view wasn't obstructed by the coffee table) gasped, "It's a bat!", stood up from the loveseat, grabbed a nearby box and smashed it onto a lump of black fur about the size of a flattened softball, lying on the hearth a few feet in front of the fireplace.
My dad and uncle leaped up and began to discuss their next move. A net? They needed a net. What about Dad's fishing net? No, the holes were too big. Mom, meanwhile, stood pressing down on the box (not a box TOP, mind you, but a full box), smashing the struggling bat flat underneath. (The last thing we wanted was for him to become airborne.) Julia and I were told to shut up and both sat on the far end of the couch, gasping.
Finally, Dad went into the garage and came back with an open box, an Amazon box I'd just opened. He dropped it on top of mom's hand, the box she was holding and (presumably) the bat, and she pulled her arm out with a bit of a struggle. I noticed that in the second Mom withdrew her hand, the bat had tried to escape and was now smashed by Dad's box, half-under and half-out. I pointed out his mistake and he lifted the box and dropped it again a few inches forward, just as Julia, Mom and Uncle Tom took off in search of a piece of cardboard to slide under the new cage.
There was a moment of frozen suspension, as Dad pushed down on the cardboard, the cats and dog looked around bewilderedly and I stood useless. Then I saw motion. Dad was facing the fireplace, so no one could see this but me, but somehow that bat had escaped from the box and was half-hopping, half-dragging itself across the living room floor toward the kitchen at breakneck speed. I pointed and screamed and again couldn't come up with a coherent sentence, but I did grab the now-interested dog as she prepared to lunge (my one and only helpful contribution.) The rest of the family came running and Mom, again displaying her quick thinking and total bad-ass-ity, reached down just as the bat scooted across a rug and folded the fabric on top of him. My uncle grabbed my sister's nearby vest and dropped that on top, rolling the whole thing up and dashing outside with it. He and my dad released the evil thing, and they reported that after a few minutes of dizzy walking, it flew off into the night.
Back inside, we were all wide awake and pumped on adrenaline. Julia explained what she'd seen--she'd been absent-mindedly watching the fire when she saw something drop and then flop onto the bricks. For a second she'd thought it was a piece of wood, and then she'd noticed it struggling to move, probably knocked out from the smoke. (Her reaction was pretty understandable. A few years back her roommate had rolled over and been bitten by a bat that was sleeping in her bed...and the same bat tried to flatten itself and enter Julia's room one night later.)
"Well that did it, I'm going to bed," Mom said after a few minutes, waving goodnight. But fifteen minutes later she was back, eyebrows furrowed, to announce, "I'm bleeding, and I wasn't bleeding before." We all took a turn inspecting the tiny speck of fresh blood on her forearm, most likely a scratch from the cardboard. But you don't really take chances when it comes to wild animals, so Mom drove herself to the ER the next day for six extremely painful shots. There will be a whole battery more in the coming days, including one on Christmas.
So, this year, I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful for my health. But most of all, I'm thankful for the rabies vaccine.
