Soup and solace

When my husband died, I made soup.

Oh, I did other things, too:

I cried.

I wore his gray flannel shirt for five days (and nights).

I read the tabbed pages of the last book he read.

I showered using that Icelandic moss soap he smelled of every morning.

I stood in front of the door to his writing room staring at the Nazar Boncugu that hung from the lintel. It is a bright blue and white glass disk we bought in Istanbul, a Turkish good luck symbol thought to protect us from illness. I cursed it.

I went to a restaurant we liked where I sat outside at a little table and ordered a Negroni, our favorite drink, and felt very very sorry for myself.

I found the cat and took him outside to see the full moon because I had to share it with someone.

But also, I made soup.

It’s not true that you can fix everything with Duct tape or WD-40. Some things require soup. And then, of course, there are some things that cannot ever be “fixed.” Like when, in the middle of October, on a brilliantly sunny day with the oaks blazing orange, he dies, this person with whom you’ve spent the last thirty years, the father of your three children, co-adventurer, co-conspirator, the one who still thought you were funny, the one who got excited about compost. He who saw the vulnerability you so effectively hid from all others. And never outed you. That one.

But there is solace in soup, truly there is.

There is the Zen of chopping vegetables. There is the all-day simmering of broth, the rich chickeny, garlicky aroma filling a house. There is the domestic routine, the calming familiarity of it all in a world, in a house suddenly made unfamiliar. There is the grace of knowing what you’re doing when really, you don’t know what you’re doing, the way that, for a minute, skimming the broth or roasting the vegetables, or pulling meat from bone, all is good.

The truth is, the world opens up once you have a good broth, and it is hard, at that moment, to feel anything but optimism. The (soup) future is wide open. Mulligatawny or spinach tortellini? Butternut squash apple or wild rice chicken? Lentil apricot? Black bean? Or just roast all the roastable vegetables in the bin: the last of the cauliflower from the late fall garden, those gnarly carrots, that Walla Walla sweet you were saving for something, those golden beets that were waiting for just the right moment that never came. That there is an easily imaginable future, that this future includes only good choices.

This is the solace of soup.

A longer version of this (with recipes!) appeared in farmer-ish magazine, the labor or love (emphasis on LABOR, double emphasis on LOVE) founded and nurtured by the extraordinary Crystal Sands. You can find it on my site under “esssays and articles.”