Well, most of that title is correct. There was a cat. We have a tile roof. The cat was on the tile roof. It was however, at 3:00 AM, so it probably wasn’t very hot and he wasn’t up there the whole time. How do we know that? There is a motion detector in our courtyard that turns on a light if it detects any thing/one. Since our bedroom is upstairs well out of sight of being overlooked by any neighbors we don’t have any window treatments. That means when the summer sun comes up at 6 o’clock there’s no sleeping late. It also means that when the pitch black is interrupted in the middle of the night with a very bright spot light, we are suddenly awake, even from a deep sleep.

Our courtyard is completely surrounded by thick concrete walls at least 8 feet (2.5 meters) tall and up to 16 feet (5 meters) as you can see in the photo above. We haven’t found out yet why that back wall is so tall but we do know that there is a church on the other side, in case that somehow figures into the solution. Once we determined that le chat was the cause of the light coming on, Bill went outside hoping to pick up our new friend and put him out our front door. Unfortunately that was not part of this little guy’s plan as he frantically tried, unsuccessfully, to climb the wall in several spots. Time for a different tactic.

We considered opening the front door in hopes that he would dash directly from the courtyard through there to the street but he might have just as easily run upstairs. Wisely, Bill next moved a ladder over to the shortest wall so that this could become the escape route. Within an instant the cat was up and away, scrambling across our neighbor’s roof. To prevent this from happening again, we’re installing a small wooden cat ladder, disguised as a trellis, to provide an easy way out.

So why was there a cat in our courtyard at 3:00 AM? Just wandering around? Looking for love? Chasing a mouse? I really don’t want to know, especially if it’s that last possibility. We don’t have much of a problem with bugs coming in the house even though, like most of our neighbors, we don’t have screens on the windows. Perhaps it’s time to rethink that.