Primitive Comfort

The weather turned foreboding yesterday afternoon, after we had a kind of barely-there, weak sunshine and high clouds most of the day.  But as the afternoon drew to a close, the dark grey clouds started rolling in, the wind began rattling at the windows and chasing itself down the flue of the stove, and things changed quickly for the worse.  When I stepped out to the back patio, the air smelled like the sea, which told me a front was moving in quickly from the Pacific.

There's something primitive about fixing dinner for a night like this...earlier in the day I had gone out to the lettuce beds and picked a large, fresh salad.  Then I took a whole chicken out of the freezer to thaw, made a generous amount of stuffing, a rosemary/mustard rub and set to getting it all ready, knowing that when darkness fell and the temperature began dropping even more rapidly, everyone would arrive home to a hot, delicious meal, to warm them from the inside out.

Surely nothing is more simple, yet better than this:  A warm fire, a hot meal, and shelter from the wind and cold.  It was a good night here at the homestead, and this morning we gratefully woke to clear skies and sunshine.