The Bat House

richard and kristina ford sent me a copy of michael reily’s memoir the bat house last week. the book centers around the author buying big 100 year old farm house in his home town along the yellowstone river in eastern montana and then spending considerable time there reconnecting with the community while fixing the place up. the house, as the name suggests, turns out to be infested by bats which he has to go to war with and eventually make peace with in order to make the place his own. the book is also about loss and grieving as he describes cancer taking the lives of people he loves the most in the world.

having recently lost someone to cancer and having moved back to my home town in montana and into a 100 year old house it certainly hit very close to home. richard wrote the blurb on the cover and is cited as a help and inspiration in the afterword, and wrote me a nice note in the book and kristina a very nice email when they sent it. i only vaguely remember michael reily, but very much remember his black lab crow when we used visit them in chouteau on hunting trips when i was a kid. he called me after my dad died and invited me to his reading here in missoula but i think i was in denver that night and missed it. i wish had a got to see him and hear him read but getting the book from richard and kristina and reading it this weekend feels like how it was suppose to happen.

i hired a home inspector to go over our 100 year old montana house back in october but have been putting off doing much about the problems he found over the winter hoping i might have some inheritance with which to address them. i still don’t have the money but my friend luke is training to be a home inspector and has some time on his hands so he’s coming over later this morning to help me get started. the first order of business, just as it was with mike in his book, is to get up into the crawl space and check out the attic. hopefully ours is bat free.