Your Batting Average Just Went Up

I used to do housesitting jobs for spare cash when I was young. I’d just go over to someone’s house once or twice a day and take care of whatever they needed done while they were away. It was easy enough, but every now and again, something odd would happen, and I’d have to figure out what to do myself since I worked alone most of the time.

One day, I was checking in on the house of a family friend living across town. He wanted me to water his plants and feed his cat while he was away. Most important to this story were the tomato plants he had growing out back. It was an absolute scorcher of a summer day, so I took care of the indoor plants and fed the cat so I’d have some time to cool off before watering the tomatoes.

When I got out, I heard a weird splashing noise. The friend had set up a large barrel of water for me to use, and the sound was coming from there. Concerned, I opened it up. To my complete and utter shock, there was a bat drowning in the barrel. It must’ve tried to get at the mosquitoes on the surface of the water (stagnant pools of water are hotbeds for breeding mosquitoes) and fallen in somehow.

To this day, I still have no idea how it got in there or how long it had been splashing and flailing. I just focused on how to fix this. To water the plants, I was supposed to use a scoop to get some water out of the barrel into a cup and carry it over to the plants, so I took the scoop and carefully lifted the bat out of the water.

The poor thing was soaked and shivering, so I set it down in the garden in a sunny spot to help it dry off and warm up, with easy access to shade for when it felt well enough to move again. I kept watching it until it stopped trembling. At that point, I poked it a little with the very tip of the scoop to see if it was still alive, and it let out a little angry squeak in my direction.

I went to take care of the plants at that point, and it was gone when I got back. I hope it was okay. Still, it was definitely not the first thing I expected to find that day.