I lifted the lid off a pan on the stove, and a cloud of steam billowed up from it along with the mouthwatering smell of well-seasoned meat. I turned the burner off so that it wouldn’t burn. My husband walked into the kitchen just as I was checking the other kettles on the stove. Arnie exclaimed, “Supper smells great! How soon do we get to eat?”

Turning to face him, I announced, “The carrots and potatoes are tender, so we can eat right now if you’re ready.”

While Arnie washed his hands, I called our middle-school aged children to join us in the dining room and placed our meal on the table. I had worked all day at the hospital, so I was happy that I had been able to produce an appealing meal for the family before anyone became grumpy.

Just as I finished my meal, a dark shadow swooped through the room. It was there and then gone in the blink of an eye. Frowning, I wondered what I had seen. Arnie had been about to take a bite of the buttered bread in his hand. Still holding the bread close to his lips, he looked around and concluded, “There’s a bat in the house.” Fourth grader Tammie and eighth grader Niki screamed.

The bat darted out of the living room, through the dining room and into the kitchen, then circled around and reversed course. I sighed wearily. This wasn’t my first bat rodeo. Grabbing a bath towel from the bathroom that had been laundered over one thousand one hundred fifty times, I stationed myself in the middle of the dining room.

On the bat’s next swing through the room, I planned to ‘towel-slap’ the flying rodent out of the air. The terrified creature flew just an inch from the high ceilings and was so fast that I missed.  On its next fly through, I was successful. The bat landed on the floor. Quickly, before it regained its senses, I used the old bath towel like a potholder to pick the bat up. Looking at the small creature within the folds of the tattered towel, I saw it had its mouth open as if to hiss, showing many sharp, small teeth. I took my capture out onto the back deck and tossed it into the dusky backyard sky. Happy to be freed, it flapped its wings and disappeared.

The house we live in is old and has an impressive bat history. The people who remodeled it in the early 1970’s said the attic had been heavily populated by bats. They claimed it wasn’t easy to get rid of them. During the first years after Arnie and I moved in, whenever I saw a bat, I insisted that it be killed, and that someone else do the dirty work.

I don’t know how it happened, but at some point, I came to realize that small fuzzy bats were not a reincarnation of Satan and began to remove them from the house myself. Arnie seldom made a move to do this job for me. I became our family’s official bat bouncer.

The evening I bounced an airborne rodent out of our house during our evening meal, was the start of a two weeklong bat invasion. Each evening between four in the afternoon and midnight for two weeks straight, I had to expel a bat from our house. Sometimes Arnie would look up from the newspaper and sardonically call out, “Kathy, your pet is back!”

I wailed, “Why are these bats coming into my house every day?” After a few days, I stopped washing the towel I used to knock the bat out of the air. I just left it folded on the bathroom floor between use.

Someone who worked with me asked, “Are you sure you aren’t capturing and tossing out the same bat every evening? You should put some bright orange paint on the bat so you can tell if it is the same one.”

I never had a chance to try marking the creatures because just as suddenly as the bat invasion started, it ended. We went back to only occasionally having a bat in the house. One thing didn’t change though: I’m still the family’s official bat bouncer.