Just Like Your Mother Used to Make, Honey

I’ve been seeking, since the celebration of Corpus Christi a couple of weeks ago, to focus each morning on feeding and being fed.  I wake and reflect on ways I’ve been taught and reminded that like the example of the Good Man Jesus (who some believe is the Son of God but most agree was an exemplary human): we are fed, and are called to share.

This morning, I woke up empty.  This daily blog is going on nine months now.  There have been only a few days when technology or travel prevented my posting.  When I began, it was because mortality gave me an urgency to share, to leave behind all that would die hidden, all that was bright and good, anyway.  But this morning I just sat, despite a very good day yesterday, rife with providence.  A felled tree was transformed by labor and a wonderful machine  from a backyard obstacle into beautiful, promising planks.  The spent energy was replaced by abundant, delicious, wholesome food at the evening’s pot luck supper with the other members of our CSA, (Community Supported Agriculture) Ware Farm.  I’ll share about that tomorrow.  But it was that very feeling of emptiness that fed me this morning that provides me with . . .

Waseineswirhaben Soup!  (Vahss-EYEness-veer-HOBben): was eines wir haben is German for “whatever we have.”  When my mom was visiting one summer, I was in the kitchen cooking, and she asked what I was making.  “Soup”, I said.  “What kind?” she asked.  I smiled, remembering Julie, the old Ukrainian lady who used to answer the Marygrove College girls’ cafeteria line question, “Julie what kind of soup do we have today?” with “Just like you mudda used to make, Honey.”  To my German mother, I replied, “whatever we have soup.”  I described to her the great meal that came from thinking we had nothing, from looking in the back of the refrigerator, and in the bottom of the bins there, to see what half-wilted vegetables and bits of this and that would be tossed into the compost pile in the next cleaning.  Those ingredients, like loaves and fishes, seemed to multiply, drawing from the rest of the kitchen forgotten spices, the dregs of the barley or the can of beans or the ziplock bags of chicken cuttings in the freezer, wings and backs and giblets.  And soon the soup pot was full, and the aroma was wonderful.

At Marygrove, Harry the cook wasted nothing; and the stock pot was always on the back of the big black stove.  Everything that was left from preparing the day’s meals for the 300 students and staff went into that pot half-filled with water, and not into the garbage.  The next day the pot would be the first thing brought from the cooler.  The heat was turned up and while breakfast was being served, Harry would be chopping carrots, or celery, adding spices and maybe some starch, and by lunchtime, there would be a rich, tasty soup among the offerings on the cafeteria line.  It was, I think now, the best part of the meal.  It was nothing but what would have been thrown away, considered useless.

I think of Harry and days like that one with my mom visiting, and I think of how delicious that soup always is, made from the "nothing" that we had on hand.  And now that I have cooked and served up this soup for you, I realize what I’m gonna cook for you tomorrow and the next day.  Jim and the WoodMizer and the Maple tree, and Bud and Bernie and Sandee and Ware Farm.  Meanwhile, check your fridge; there’s some Waseineswirhaben Soup waiting for you there.  Bon appétit!

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.