Like a bat out of hell, I’ll be gone when the morning comes.

~ Meat Loaf

So, tell the truth now, do you have bats in your belfry?

The answer is definitively no. We do not have bats in our belfry.

However, we have had a bat swooping around the fans in our 20-foot great room ceiling. And if I’m being honest, it happened more than once.

Ardent fans of the blog will remember the first time we found a bat in the church, and I recounted that slapstick incident in the book.

It (or its relative) visited twice more, after we moved in. The first time, the little imp disappeared. Suddenly, he was winging around the room while we were watching TV, we chased him around for a bit, and then *poof* he was gone. Very disconcerting, it was.

The second time, my hero of a husband batted him down (get it? He batted down a bat?) with a fish net and then removed him from the great room in a bucket. Since it’s illegal to kill bats, let’s just say he flew off to greener pastures. Or a better belfry. Whatever.

Tyler suspected the bats were getting into the false roof of the church through the chimney (not the belfry), so that’s been sealed up, and we haven’t seen a bat in a long time. We could never figure out how they were getting from the false roof into the house. That part’s a mystery.

Metaphorically, do we have bats in our belfry? Also a definitive no as evidenced by the end result we live in. We weren’t crazy. We were crazy like foxes: seemingly foolish but in fact extremely cunning.

# # #

My memoir Church Sweet Home: A Renovation to Warm the Soul comes out May 5. The paperback will be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Preorder the ebook at Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Kobo.