Reflections - Pumpkins, Bats, and Snakes, Oh My!

Rills and Bat Eye to Eye

On August 15, Halloween hadn’t occurred to me as the solution.

I got up early, at 5:20 a.m. to be exact, and waved to my son Charlie, who was writing at the desk in the guest room. Expecting to finish ablutions and my own morning writing before 8:00, first I strolled to the great room for cat cuddles. The cats lined up side by side by side in front of the wood stove’s glass door. The alert furry brothers glared at something inside.

“A bat.” Charlie walked into the room, rubbed my upper arm, and left for work at UPS.

The bat must have flown into the chimney during last night’s thunderstorm. The critter needed to fly out. Twilight lit the tiny opening at the top of the chimney. Hopefully, the bat would sense the opening and fly out tonight.

I fetched my phone and tapped the camera app.

Tails swished. Paws rapped the glass. Cats swarmed, changing positions.

The bat flew across the firebox, trudged through ashes, and crawled up fire bricks.

Gilbert moseyed to the water fountain. A few minutes later, Ande abandoned the bat to gobble cat crunchies. Rills hovered at the stove.

The winged critter crawled slower and slower.

My normal plan for freeing uninvited critters is to trap them in containers and let them loose outside.

“Be careful.” Spence interrupted his computer headline reading. “Bats have rabies.”

Open the firebox door and chance the bat escaping into the house? Nope. Not me.

Sunlight rose over the wooded hill and shone through the sliding glass deck door. The bat crawled behind the fire bricks to get out of the light. The cats collapsed for naps. I scooped them up, cuddled them, and started morning activities—way late.

At dark, the bat appeared in the firebox. Cats patted the glass and twitched their tails. I headed for bed and monitored activities by thumps and bumps. In the middle of the night I woke to Charlie chuckling—over cat antics no doubt.

The bat had two choices—fly up the chimney or die.

Several days later, the cats completely ignored the firebox. Fingers crossed that the bat had discovered the way out, I peered inside. Drat. “Spence, the bat died.”

“You can take it out.” He flipped a potato pancake in the skillet. “Or I’ll get to it.”

With our new geothermal heating system, I figured he would clear the ashes in time to light a yule log. Did I want to do the deed?

Behind the glass firebox door, the bat wings were spread on the ashes as if an exhibit at a natural history museum. People decorate for Halloween with bats. Nature provided this one in a Halloweeny thunderstorm. I didn’t remove the bat. It could be a Halloween decoration.

For a month and a half before others decorated, the bat reposed. Only I acknowledged its true purpose.

Early in October neighbors decorated—skeletons with sickles guarded tombstones, plastic bats dangled from fake cobwebs, dried corn stalks backed harvested pumpkins. Time arrived for me to hang more visible decorations.

Kneeling by a plastic storage tub in the loft, I dug past painted eggs and the red, white, and blue hats. At the bottom, under noise makers, lay three bundles of the ornamental corn Spence managed to grow despite deer raids years back. The dried husks rustled. Gilbert poked his nose into the storage box. I pushed him out. Hanging one cluster on the front door, I kept Gilbert inside with my foot. The other clusters adorned the wall by the kitchen clock. The rustling stopped and Gil wandered off.

 

Ornamental Corn

Ande investigated when I banged push pins into wood paneling at the end of the hall. He pawed my jeans to make me stop. I didn't so he retreated to the basement. Over the push pins, I hung the quilted attic window wall hanging of fall maples and oaks from Anne of Green Gables Lover’s Lane.

Last, I hung the quilted hanging with three pumpkins and a black cat in the great room. Rills circled my feet. So close to the food bowls, he possibly thought I might add to his dwindling supply. 

Rills raised his nose, sniffing the new addition.

I glanced at the bat in the wood stove. Encased in its exhibit cage, it didn’t emit the stench of rotting critters that occasionally affronts Spence and me on health walks.

Health walks in October took us down our dirt road past the witch hazel trees with the exploding nuts or up the road to Flickengers’ horse pasture, 1851 farmhouse, and the neighborhood’s best fall decorations. The dirt road itself became a fall canvas.

The hickory trees produced a bountiful harvest this year. Squirrels and chipmunks left many nuts scattered across the road. Tires squashed the hulls creating fuzzy dark brown polka dots the diameter of tennis balls. Each passing pickup and trailer, like a steam roller, compacted the lumps into splotchy parts of the road surface.

Open topped Shearer’s dump trucks, that carried grains from silos to mills, sprinkled yellow corn kernels. The kernels only decorated the road a day or two. Squawking crows and blue jays swooped down to gobble the colorful treat.

On a dreary earlobe-chilling day, wind thrashed treetops. Leaves showered the road, smacked Spence in the face, and hit the side of my head. Crimson, amber and russet leaves skittered or glided across the hard packed dirt adding color. Over time they darkened. Like the hickory husks, tires flattened the tawny and brown leaves into the dirt making a smooth mosaic of brown on brown.

One day near the end of the month, Spence grabbed my arm and pulled. “Watch your step.”

Under my raised foot lay the silver belly of an unmoving snake in a squiggly shape. “Thanks.” I’d been checking the treetops. Half had bare branches. I focused on the road and pushed Spence away from the next snake, shaped like a treble clef. We continued, dodging the newest road decorations. Snakes had slithered in search of a hibernaculum for the cooling weather. About a dozen hadn’t reached their goal. Silver bellies, and one neon-orange, curled in twisted shapes.

By the time we reached Flickenger’s farm, dodging so many snakes—I prefer snakes one at a time—had boosted my courage. I dared more. “Spence, do you think Charlie or Deb would mind if I trespassed to get a picture of her decorations?” They’re friendly neighbors, but I hadn’t called ahead. I don’t venture onto others' property without asking permission.

Spence squinted. “His truck isn’t here. Maybe they’re not home.”

Not confident, but wanting a picture of the three pumpkins atop the bale of straw in front of the antique plow, I walked up the driveway.

No one came outside. I couldn’t ask.

I inched across the grass, whipped out my phone, and focused on the pumpkins.

 

Pumpkins at Flickengers' House

A car engine rumbled down the road. Tires ground on the driveway behind me.

“Busted,” Spence said.

Gulp. Was he joking? Wishing I’d waited for permission, I snapped three quick photos and stuffed the phone into a pocket. I would apologize for intruding.

Deb left her engine running and stepped out of the car.

Spence shouted, “You won the Janet prize for best decorations. She wanted to get a picture.”

Deb broke into a jack-o’-lantern size grin. “Pumpkins are so expensive. I found those in Amish country at a reasonable price.”

Duh! Of course she didn’t mind. I shared Deb’s smile and walked with Spence to join her in the driveway.

“We don’t get pumpkins until November first.” Spence folded his arms and spread his feet in a comfortable conversation pose. “The price goes down then.”

The conversation drifted from pumpkin soup, pumpkin rolls, bales of straw, and painting wood the shade of farmhouse bricks to Deb’s cats, the gray wolf, bears, foxes, coyotes, coywolves, and bobcats roaming the neighborhood. Deb’s car engine hummed. A pair of her tabby cats long-stepped past Spence and me to collect cuddles from Deb.

On Halloween Day we headed down the road to check the witch hazels. I stepped on a squashed silver squiggle. “No worries.” I said, mostly to reassure myself. “Tires ground the snake so far down it became part of the road.” A pair of red tail hawks, screeching and soaring under blue-gray clouds, distracted me until we reached the trees.

“They decorated themselves.” Spence pulled down a branch. “Get it? The flowers look like witch hair. Witch hazel.”

The stringy yellow flowers did resemble wee wigs and.with imagination, the empty nuts portrayed mini monster jaws. Like most deciduous trees by then, the witch hazels had bare branches. Along the berm, oaks and beeches still held rust, brown, and yellow-gold leaves.

We didn’t get any trick-or-treaters. We never do in rural Western Pennsylvania. Instead, after midnight, sleety snow fell. Three inches of frosty white covered Wells Wood, our decorated dirt road, and Deb’s pumpkins.

This week country folks will replace the skeletons and tombstones with plastic turkeys and pilgrims. Deb and I will leave our decorations up. Even the bat. Gray ashes dust its brown fur. The critter isn’t in anyone’s way, and the rabies danger has probably passed. Still, dead wild animals are never safe to touch. When Spence clears the firebox for the yule log, I’ll remind him, “Be careful. Bats have rabies.”

 

Snow on the Pawpaw Tree