On the road to Dodgeville this morning, after My Darling B and I helped Jim & Sue load all their furniture into a U-Haul in the near-freezing rain, B asked me, not at all rhetorically, “You know what would be really good right now? Biscuits and gravy.” As if I wasn’t hungry enough already, now I was drooling for a breakfast that I wouldn’t be eating any time soon. It was like hearing the first few notes of a pop song you hoped you’d never hear again. No matter how quickly you reached for the radio buttons to switch to another station, you’re going to have that song stuck in your head the rest of the day.

My Darling B’s biscuits and gravy are the very best biscuits and gravy because she makes them from scratch. There’s a whole stick of butter in the biscuits, she crumbles plenty of sausage into the gravy and she uses real eggs. As an added bonus, she serves it with a side of sausage links. Some day we won’t be able to eat like this, so we might as well enjoy it while we can, right?

But there would be no enjoying biscuits and gravy on the road to Dodgeville, or any time soon after. We were going there to help unload all the furniture we just loaded into the van so that Jim & Sue could settle into the retirement home they built in the woods on the edge of town. In all the photos Sue showed us, it looked like a teensy-tiny little cottage, but we found when we got there that it was in fact a quite roomy three-bedroom house with a finished basement, and a good thing, too. The truckload of furniture we unloaded was quickly followed by another truckload of furniture that we retrieved from storage, and then another truckload of boxed odds and ends, also retrieved from storage. They’re going to be unpacking from now until the zombie apocalypse.

If only the zombies had risen from their graves today. We would have given them a good run for their money, because they would have been waterlogged and nearly frozen into immobility. A nine-year-old with a baseball bat could probably have held off a vast shambling mob of zombies without too much trouble. The rain let up for an hour here and there but the cold never did, steadily dropping one or two degrees every hour until the time we finally finished up and turned the car toward home, when the dashboard thermometer read thirty-eight.

Jim & Sue are now snug and warm in their cute little retirement home, and we’re home and dry once again, our bellies full. B made biscuits and gravy after we stopped at the co-op on the way home to pick up some scratch to make it with.