Drafts

The construction crew says we have bats in the house, which Ned seems to think may be related to the way the crew sometimes leaves the walls open when they knock off for the day. I defer to Ned on matters of construction management, but I am not convinced a bat would need to possess unusually sophisticated problem-solving abilities to get into the house in its current state: ell demo’d, bay windows cracked, just two out of three chimneys properly capped. Frames for new walls and windows mark the place’s potential, but they present no real barrier to light, or wind, or apparently bats. The place is a sieve.

Ned gets up to the Project often, catching: paint droppings on tarps, up with the neighbors, contractors between jobs. Logged on at my day job, I get to the Project virtually: saving the photos Ned texts from the work site; wading through the emails, plans, and invoices that keep things moving from a distance.

Meanwhile, a small cauldron of unfinished posts linger in the dark recess of this newsletter’s draft folder. Sometimes I get brave and inspect one, to see if there is something lively I can urge out into the wild. One is an unillustrated entry called Drought. Drought has been hanging limply in the drafts folder since 2021.

It’s been a dry spell. Says the Drought draft.

And that is all it says.

Monitoring from a distance, for months I’ve thought, a little darkly: who wants to read about me catching up on the bills, weighing construction choices by email, catching a glimpse from a text? The house is a sieve, a frame, an outline. A loosely-strung dream catcher, yarn on popsicle sticks, thin-lined elevations on emailed plans. It captures my imagination, I guess, and I miss it. But for months I’ve had writer’s block. It’s been a dry spell. Suspended drafts, vaguely threatening, linger in the folder: thoughts unfinished, photos yet to be cropped.

Wendell, our neighbor, is not worried about the bats. They’ll leave, he assures Ned. Or they’ll turn to dust. The new windows should arrive at the Project soon, Ned thinks. And the insulation panels. I’m deleting Drought. The bats might want to weigh their options.