Vegetable Soup for the Soul

It has been a soggy four days in South Carolina. Wet, chilly, windy, and grey. Not my favorite kind of weather. I am a Sunshine kinda girl. I am, however, the eternal optimist about things, so if there is a silver lining to this low lying, soil soaking kinda weather....it has to be Vegetable Soup.

Good 'ole, throw some meat in the pot, boil it up and dump every yummy veggie you can find in it kinda soup. The kind you make in the biggest pot you have, and you cook it all day long. That's the way my Momma did it...as did her Momma before her....and it is how I make it too. The ingredients are never quite the same, but somehow it always tastes yummy. Throw together some sweet corn bread, and you have a meal that will warm you to the core!

I was raised on made from scratch, yellow corn meal, cornbread. Mark was raised on Jiffy Mix. I had never had Jiffy prior to matrimony....but I tried it, and I liked it! Probably because it is more like cake than bread! Oh, but it's sweetness is the perfect culinary balance to the slightly acidic soup! I like to crumble my cornbread into my soup bowl. Mark, my hubby...he is a dipper. So I bake my cornbread in a deeper dish, so that when it bakes I can cut it into perfect thick squares of golden goodness :) Perfect for dipping! Yes, I love my man...and he loves my Jiffy squares.

One of the hardest days for me after my Mom got ill, was a day when I was really sick with a cold and wanted some Vegetable Soup. She always made it for us kids when we were sick....even after we grew up and got married and did not live under her roof anymore. Looking back, I think that was the first day that I really got honest with myself about the finality of her illness. Somehow I knew deep inside that I would never have HER Vegetable Soup again. I would never have HER, not ill, again. I do not really recall what the weather was like outside that day, but in my heart...it was one of the darkest days ever. Those of you who have lost a parent, or have elderly or ill parents know exactly what I am talking about. It is hard to explain...and it is more difficult to fully digest.

I don't really know what came over me that day, but as horrible as I felt, I got up, pulled out my big pot, threw in some meat...then through tears and 101 degree fever, I made my own pot of soup. It was a rite of passage. It was a line drawn in the sand between being the child and becoming the adult. It was the beginning of knowing that I had to let her go, and knowing there was nothing I could do to change it. The sweetest cornbread in the world could not cut the bitterness of that fact.

Oddly enough, after that one particular episode of melancholy meal making....I felt so much better. Not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. I can make Vegetable Soup now, without tears and with fond thoughts of Momma and the way she loved and cared for us. And those sweet memories, definitely warm me to the core.

Um, Um, Good!
~Scarlett