Something is happening.

Not the ordinary Sunday something — the coffee, the murmur of a voice in the studio, the sound of the door to the yard letting in the morning. This is a different register entirely. I identified it from the bedroom at approximately 08:40, through two walls and a hallway.

Cornbread. Ribs. And beneath that, still early, still cold — the suggestion of hamburgers.

I am not a dog who makes a fuss. But I want to be accurate: this is among the finest mornings in recent memory.

The kitchen is loud in a way it usually isn’t until later in the day. Things are being moved. Something is going into something else. The particular sound of the oven has been confirmed. I made a single, quiet assessment of the counter situation — legs too short, a fact I accept without complaint — and retired to my position near the studio sofa, where I am technically resting and practically monitoring everything.

Gus stationed himself near the counter the moment the smell reached him. He is there now. Sitting. Still as a post, his nose angled upward at approximately the angle of a hound who has made a decision and will not be moved from it. His legs don’t reach either. Neither of us has jumped. Neither of us would. Some things are simply not done.

I handle these situations differently. I am on the sofa. My eyes are closed. I have done the math.

There is also something happening on the television in the family room. Crowd noise, a different rhythm than I’m used to — not football, not basketball. Something else. Spain, I gather. The room has a particular charge when something is going well and this room has that charge. Dad is in there. He seems pleased with something that is not the ribs, which is his right.

It is Father’s Day.

I know what this means in the way I know most things — by what it produces. A kitchen like this. Both of them here. The whole house running at a different speed than a regular Sunday, warmer in its feeling if not quite yet in its temperature. 17°C this morning, clear, the ponderosas holding still. But inside the door, something building.

The ribs are not ready. I understand this. The cornbread is further along — I can tell by how the smell has changed in the last twenty minutes, deepened, gone from raw possibility to something approaching certainty.

I am patient. I am also 65 pounds and possess a nose that was engineered, across several centuries, for exactly this kind of problem.

Dad is the one I follow through every room, the one I find when I wake, the one the mornings are organized around. That he gets a day that smells like this seems not just fair but correct.

The math, as I said, is already done.

I am simply waiting for the answer.

~P.W.