The television has been running the same tournament for some time now. A ball travels at considerable speed across a rectangle. Someone hits it back. This continues until one of them stops. Then they do it again.

I have watched enough of this to form a view.

The ball is yellow. Slightly fuzzy. I know what a fuzzy yellow ball smells like — warm rubber, the particular dust of an outdoor surface, a faint sweetness underneath that I cannot name but recognize completely. I know what it sounds like when it bounces. I know what it sounds like when someone throws one, really throws one, not taps it over a net to a person standing twenty meters away who taps it back.

No one is throwing the ball. No one is running after it. Both participants are simply returning it to sender, indefinitely, until one of them declines to.

I do not follow the logic.

Dad watches with the particular stillness he reserves for things he considers important. Mom watches when she passes through. The room has a mood — attentive, a little tense — and the cold has settled in this week in a way that makes the family room feel smaller and warmer than it is, which is not a complaint. 8°C before sunrise is a fact the doggy door has communicated clearly. The ponderosas hold the cold differently than they hold the heat. September in Bend does not negotiate.

But here is the thing.

Last Friday, the freezer opened. I was in the studio and I heard it — not the sound of the door exactly, but the shift in air pressure, the brief cold exhale, and then the specific weight of what was lifted out. A frozen femur bone makes a sound when it meets a countertop that is unlike any other sound in the house. Low. Solid. A little dull. Final in the best sense.

I was off the sofa before the sentence finished.

The cold of it in the mouth at first — that is the part they don’t understand, the humans, the part that makes it worth everything. Not the marrow, not even the smell, though the smell is considerable. The cold itself. The resistance of it. The way it asks something of you before it gives anything back.

Gus took his to the bedroom. I took mine to the living room. We did not consult on this. Some arrangements require no committee.

The tournament on the television will continue for another week or so. The yellow ball will continue its supervised journey back and forth across the rectangle. Dad will watch. The room will hold its particular September temperature.

I will note, for the record, that a ball thrown down a hallway covers the distance in approximately four seconds. I have timed this. I am ready when anyone is.

The bone was cold. Then it wasn’t. That is the whole story and it was exactly right.

~P.W.