Last Monday morning I left my house at 5:50 AM to go mass with the Salesian Sisters across town. When I came back at 7:50 AM and went to take my vitamin pill, I found dirty spots on the toilet bowl. Some of them looked like paw prints. I found that exceeding strange. I live alone. The house was locked up. I don’t have a cat or any other pet–although the geckos are free to come and go.
I figured it had to be an animal and because there were paw prints inside the toilet bowl, I surmised that it must have climbed up on the toilet and down inside it to get a drink. But what kind of animal and how did something that big get in the house?
I thought about this all day…and then coming home in the evening, it occurred to me that there IS an opening into my living space, at the top of a blocked stairway leading from my second floor room to a third floor where some indigenous students from the provinces live. The house is four floors tall, built for a single family, with internal stairways leading from floor to floor. The landlord, though, has blocked off the stairway leading from my second floor to the third floor. That is the covering with metal grill at the top of the stairs. I use the blocked stair steps for storing old suitcases that I may need when I haul stuff back to the United States.
But the covering over the stairwell is poorly done and there is a six-inch space between the top of the highest step and the cover. It’s plenty big for a cat-size animal to get through. I didn’t think the students had a cat, though, but then the next morning I found a large cat at the foot of these stairs and when I yelled at it, it jumped on the suitcases and scurried back upstairs.
The weather was about 100ºF that Monday and I’m guessing that while the students were out, the cat went looking for a drink of water and found my toilet.
