Bat exorcism

Saturday is a day of small towns: Williston, Graytown, Lindsay, Berlin Heights, Vermilion.

We stop at a graduation party near Williston; Miss DWH gets hit in the face by a basketball, throwing iced tea from a transparent plastic glass on her left shoulder, as if she's making a wish; we travel to pick up my mother, unnerved by a bat that has flown into her house; then on to Vermilion, for the Fish Festival Parade of Boats with Lights. You'd think the decorations would be nautical, but no: there's Snoopy in his doghouse while "Red Baron" plays, and what looks like Moses Parting the Red Sea with a cross at the bow of the boat.

We stop at Granny Joe's for ice cream. Granny Joe's has a historical marker: it was formerly a funeral parlor and one of the first buildings in Vermilion, a low happy yellow house with a white porch.

And then back to do a bat exorcism.

The bat has sequestered itself in a roll up shade and emerges when Mr. DWH rolls down the shade. It's wing span is longer than Miss DWH's hand outstretched and when it flies towards her she thinks of earlier in the day, when she looked up and a basketball was a foot from my face and then slam, dunk. She can't watch.

Mr. DWH hits the bat with a broom three times and still it flies. Finally he pins it on the floor and it bares its teeth. He flings it outside.

It's hard not to think of a bat as some embodiment of evil or a harbinger of bad things. But there it is, it's just a bat.