Deborah Woehr

The cat population is growing in our neighborhood, largely because the coyotes that threatened them last summer have moved on . . . I hope. Over the past six months, I’ve watched four cats roaming around our front and back yards.

This morning, I was sitting in my garage, having a smoke with my husband, when I kept hearing a cat meowing. It wasn’t the normal meow or the “I’m horny” meow, but a cry for help. I kept looking at my husband’s Willys, thinking it had somehow got trapped inside there because the sound was muffled.

I asked the hubby if he heard the noise, but he just shrugged. We’ve been hearing something running across our roof since the week before the SuperBowl. That cat kept meowing, and I kept listening. It wasn’t inside the garage.

The hubby eventually went to work. I returned to my computer, still hearing the cat’s crying. After a minute, I decided to go outside and investigate. It took all of a second for the cat to notice me and start howling from his position on my roof.

He’s a big fluffy black cat that I’d never seen before. I immediately called for the boys to open the garage door so I could get the step ladder. Once they opened it, I found the ladder wedged between the Willys and a bunch of other crap.

I gave up on the ladder for the time being and went to search for some alternatives. My husband never reinstalled the shutters he’d taken down when he redid the windows. So I tried to use one as a ramp. But I couldn’t get it sturdy enough so the cat would trust it and come down.

I tried using my dining room chairs, to no avail. My hands could touch the top of the gutter, but I wasn’t tall enough to reach over them to grab the cat. The kids managed to wrestle the step ladder out of its cramped space.

We set it up for the cat to jump on. No go, he said through his howling. He’s still up there right now, and I’m not about to climb up to the roof to go get him. I don’t do heights, period.

The cat has three options, the way I see it:

1. Wait for the mailman (who has a few inches on me) to help in a couple of hours.
2. Figure out that the step ladder is safe enough to jump on.
3. Wait 8+ hours before my husband gets home from work.

I’ll keep you posted. Boy, this has been an exciting week!