Soup’s on!

In all my grumbling and complaining about unseasonable weather (which is anything under 50 degrees), I decided to count at least one blessing every day.
The first thing that came to mind was, “It’s soup time.” Every day, it’s soup time! What’s better than a big bowl of homemade soup? (It has to be homemade so you can smell it simmering all day.)
There’s not much aroma in opening a can of tomato soup and warming it up. Now, when I fixed a pot of tomato roasted garlic soup, that aroma warmed the house from mid-morning ‘til eatin’ time.
My love of soup is rooted in my childhood. Monday was wash day. Always. Never a deviation. And on washdays, we knew when we got off the bus and walked the long lane to our house, we would catch the smell of homemade soup--always beef vegetable--and bread just coming out of the oven. How my mother found the time to bake bread after washing all day, I don’t know. But that was our fare every Monday. Oh, we had potato soup and ham and bean soup, too, but on washday, it was beef vegetable.
Homemade bread was all we ever had. Not that I am complaining, but, let’s be honest, when you packed a lunch, as we had to do for the first four or five years in elementary school, sandwiches were always made out of homemade bread.
My dear friend, Mary Lee Williamson, whose parents owned the U-Smile grocery on the south end of town, was very lucky, I thought. Her sandwiches were made with “baker’s bread.” No jelly involved; she got a bologna sandwich.
We used to trade. I always took a dill pickle (home-canned, of course), so Mary Lee would trade me a half of her bologna sandwich for my dill pickle. She would even offer to trade me half of her sandwich for half of mine. What a friend!
Anyway, the snow, and my love of soup, has had me doing some reminiscing--and on a frigid day, that’s good.
I started clearing out my hundreds of photos. A good thought, but when I started going through them one by one, well, each one holds a special memory, and I smile as I remember the son, daughter, family get-together, etc. I spent one entire afternoon and got through just one box. But it was a great afternoon remembering a picnic in the mountain, an overnight trip to Paintrock, a Christmas Eve in my mother’s living room with a group of raucous adults playing a musical game that had us all laughing and arguing about whether the song was “legal” or not.
So, I put the pictures away. Had a few where there were red-eyed kids, pictures that I should have thrown away 40 or 50 years ago.
It’s been another great way to while away the “don’t go outside” days; one memory leads to another, and before you know it, it’s soup time again.
So I thank God for a warm house, and old photos that bring back happy times.