It was in the deep of the night when I woke up suddenly. Our two daughters dressed in their night gowns stood silently at my bedside in the top room of the tower. You must understand that to do the trip from the lower floor to the upper part of the tower was quit an undertaking in the dark. Even though we had left the light on in the long, steep staircase it must have been scary for the children to come up all this way. “Mama, we can’t sleep any more”, said my older daughter calmly. “There is a bat flying around in our room making a lot of noise.” With that said my husband got up and went downstairs with the children. I fell back to sleep immediately. The next morning at the breakfast table there was much discussion about the bat, especially, how to get it out of the tower safely.

The next night, we all sat on the children’s king size bed with dimmed lights. We had just finished the bedtime story, when the bat woke up and started to fly around frantically near the ceiling of the room. Isabel Thalia, our younger daughter, sat up in her bed with a “this-is- better-than-any-good-night-time-story” look in her eyes.

With a double-long broomstick my husband tried to guide the bat to one of the open windows. But because of the very tall room the broomstick was not long enough to help the bat find its way out. Meanwhile, Isabel Thalia so mesmerized by the play but very tired, had fallen asleep while still sitting up. Nora, our older daughter, got very worried. How long could a bat survive without any food?

The next day we found a spoon net in the cellar of the tower. That came in very handy when my husband found the bat in the evening. It had flown up through the narrow staircase to the top room. There it clung against a side wall within easy reach. We caught it with the spoon net and let it free on the top of the tower. Long after we could hear her shrieking sound through the fog high above the medieval town.