Two-thirds of my cats did not mysteriously appear on my roof yesterday. That is a pretty good percentage.

Let me tell you about our ladder. It is a long wooden thing, and nearly, but not quite, reaches to the edge of the roof. So when I got home, my father-in-law, who was babysitting, had build a rickety Rube-Goldbergish contraption out of sawhorses and boards upon which to stand the ladder so that one could climb up to where the little red cat stood in the gutter, shivering and meowing, while my mother-in-law and youngest daughter stuck their heads out the skylight a few feet away and rattled a box of catfood and said “here, kitty kitty,” while the same little cat observed them closely yet failed to get the message.

I also failed to coax him in, so I climbed up the ladder and carried him down, roundly cursing him and holding him securely by the scruff of the neck like one of those little European purses for men European gentlemen carry, assuming said purse was full of something valuable yet fragile, like a donor kidney, and – still with the purse metaphor – if same purse at the same time also had four feet all with sharp claws trying to get a good hold on my chest, and had just done something very stupid, yet amazing.