Meat Loaf . .

This has been such a mild winter. I've missed the cold and snowy weather. Everything has been extremely dry. Thursday I thought we might get a taste of winter. When I left the office I heard such a racket in the sky, I looked up, and I saw hundreds of geese with their wings windmilling as they headed from a nearby pond toward the southwest. Maybe they were foretelling something.

The next morning I had forgotten the geese. I entered the main hall outside my office. It is a long hall crowned by a domed skylight. If there had been fowl play the night before and the flock had been asked to provide proof of their whereabouts, the inquisitors had only to look up. Their alibi was splattered all over the skylight. I wondered who was going to have to clean it.

This weekend God took care of the mess. We had fierce wind and rain but the skylights were cleaned. The winds flattened two of the outbuildings of a co-worker, sailed their trampoline to who knows where, and in exchange left her a pig barn from two properties to the west. The winds were gusting up to 68 miles an hour and I wondered if were moving without a winter into an awesome west Texas spring.

Meat loaf? Yeah. Before all that wind and rain hit we had leaden skies and a really gloomy afternoon. I talked to one of my friends and told her I had made a meat loaf. So had she. And just before we chatted, she talked with a mutual friend who also made meat loaf. It was just that kind of day.

There are a million ways to make meat loaf and I'm not going to say mine's any better than yours or your mama's. It is just one of those comfort foods that seems so right when there is a dismal day outside the windows. (Mustard, not ketchup in the meat; ketchup on top; soft bread in the milk and eggs instead of breadcrumbs. Other than that, nothing extraordinary. Meat loaf doesn't need to be gussied up!)