Cat Poop on the Roof – a true story
Back when I was in college, a friend told me, “If you want to know whether you can handle being a relationship, get a cat. If you want to know whether you can handle being a parent, get a dog.” I had a cat at the time; the husband and the child came later. I have to say, however, that neither my husband or my child has ever pooped on the roof.
Several months ago, I was looking out the big plate glass windows across the back of our house and noticed something odd in valleys of the roof where the garage roof meets the breezeway roof. It looked like someone had thrown rocks onto the roof. Now, we have decorative rocks in the flowerbed across the back fence of our home, but I have never seen and couldn’t imagine a situation in which someone would choose to hurl them onto the roof.
I called my husband over and asked him to take a look.
“Yep, we’ve got rocks on the roof,” he said, nonplussed. “So what?”
“Well, I don’t think those are rocks,” I replied.
Determined to solve the mystery, I retrieved the pair of binoculars we sometimes take to football games and took a second look.
Sure enough, the items on the roof were not igneous in nature. They were pieces of fossilized cat poop.
Horrified, I went around the garage to the driveway to see if the poop was visible from the street. It was.
Now the dilemma. How, exactly, does one go about getting cat poop off his or her roof?
Years and years ago (and I’m talking about the time when dinosaurs walked the earth), my friends and I would climb the fence in the backyard of my parents’ house and climb onto the roof. Sitting on the roof was cool. This, of course, was before the Internet and video games were invented.
I have six knee surgeries under my belt. My husband (wisely so) has forbidden that I climb on as much as a stepstool lest I fall and break a hip. At 6’7”, my husband’s center of gravity makes climbing on anything higher than a step stool equally as dangerous, so climbing up on to the roof ourselves was a non-starter.
And so, for several days, I stewed about the problem. I hoped for a huge downpour, thinking that it might wash the waste away. Then I had a great idea: ask the yard service to assign someone to climb up on the roof and use the yard blower to clear the mess away. The yard service we use cleans our gutters this way about once a year for an extra fee, so the request wasn’t that much out of the ordinary. Believe me, I was willing to pay an additional service fee to have someone help me with the problem.
The following week, I asked the foreman if this was an option.
“Sure. No problem,” he said. “I’ll take care of it right now.”
Pleased with my ingenuity and problem solving skills (and breathing a huge sigh of relief), I returned to my computer and went back to work, which is, after all, what I am supposed to be doing during the day instead of gazing at my navel or, in this case, cat poop.
Later that afternoon, I looked out the windows at my now pristine roof as I walked to the kitchen to get a fresh glass of iced tea.
The poop was gone! Hooray!
Or so I thought.
Are you familiar with the saying, “Not in my backyard?”
Well, guess what. The cat poop was now in my backyard. That presented a new problem because most of the area is taken up by a 40,000-gallon swimming pool.
Yes, dear reader, I experienced a horror similar to that of the snooty country club matrons and their children in Caddyshack when a Baby Ruth bar in the deep end is mistaken for a turd.
But those weren’t Baby Ruth minis in my pool.
Ugh.
I had exchanged one problem for another.
Fortunately, I could solve this problem. All I had to do was skim out what poop I could, vacuum the pool, and shock the pool. Easy, right?
I have to admit that I considered draining the pool a la Caddyshack and donning a HAZMAT suit before disinfecting it with the strongest chemicals I could buy legally, but my husband said that would be too expensive.
So I settled for cleaning and shocking the pool. Twice.
This was very upsetting for the dog, a Labrador Retriever who loves to swim in the pool several times a day. The pool is usually only “closed” to her one day a week for cleaning, just like the community pool used to close one day a week each summer when we were kids.
It was then that I realized the root of the problem. The cat must have taken to pooping on the roof when we brought home our puppy (now dog). The backyard and all surrounding territory had previously been the cat’s sole domain, but the puppy changed all that.
I should also note that, in addition to this revelation, I also realized why the cat poop had looked fossilized through the binoculars on first glance. And, yes, I realized it must have been there for quite some time before I noticed.
I’m happy to say that, fortunately, the days of cat poop on the roof are behind us.
Nowadays, the cat prefers to use the very clean, always dry, and very private litter box provided for her in the utility room, the dog has learned a healthy respect for the cat, and I’m happy.
And, as the saying goes, “When Momma’s happy, everybody’s happy.”
The End.