All of That and A Bowl of Soup

Friday night after a meal of pasta prepared by my fabulous mother-in-law, I had not yet gotten to the dishes and my son was playing at the stove, as if he was cooking.  He was using the dirty pots and pans that were sitting there.  He told me he was making soup.  He was adding every ingredient he could find.  I started showing him different spices.  He crushed up some Mexican Oregano.  He dropped a pinch of salt.  He ground some fresh black pepper.  He went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of soy sauce and he added all these components into a pan of "noodle water," as he called it, from the left over pasta.  It was acres of fun watching him try a little of this and try a little of that making a culinary masterpiece from the shadows of his infinite 6 year old imagination.  I couldn't have been more proud of him.  My heart vibrated through my soul when he called to me over his shoulder, as he was stirring his broth with a wooden spoon, "I'm a good cook too.  Just like you daddy."  Life truly doesn't get any better than that.

It instantly transported me to those priceless moments when I was his age; standing on a stack of phone books, as my grandmother, hand over hand, guided my wooden spoon through a pot of beans for supper.  The aromas that floated from Meme's cast iron skillet still waft through my consciousness to this day.  With tears welling up in my eyes my son looked at me and said "taste."  And while my taste buds objected my heart knew I will never encounter a more beautiful plate of food.

When I finished sampling the nector of my 6 year old, he suggested that we make Chicken Noodle Soup together.  Well, now he's speaking my language.  I had made some dark chicken stock earlier in the week, so this was the perfect chance to use it for the greatest of all purposes, my son wanted to. 

Life has come full circle with me guiding my son's spoon this time.  New aromas are filling the kitchen and implanting themselves into his memory. 

There are no recipes for this entry.  Honestly, how can you measure out imagination and love in quantifiable steps, because that is what our soup tasted like.  We couldn't buy those ingredients at Whole Foods.  No these ingredients were simply cultivated deep under the rich soil that allows my family to grow. 

We've had some rough seasons, even times of famine and drought where our survival wasn't always certain.  Some could look at our history and it would look to many like 'yucky' old left-over noodle water that has been seasoned with childish affronts to the conventional.  To me, it is the affirmation that we may have scars in this life, but these scars are the souvenirs collected along the shores of our better nature.  These scars remind us.  They haunt us.  They hide us.  Bult ultimately they ornament us.  And that is the freshest thing produced from the fickle earth under my family; "us."  We are more than the sum of our parts.  There is more than my wife and son and me.  There is who we are together.  There is  who we are in the breathless cackle of my son as I tickle him in the morning to wake him up.  There is who we are in the cups of tea left for my wife every morning as she heads off to work.  There is who we are in the moments shared with my wife, looking at the sky from our back patio smelling the air ten minutes before it rains.  Its all of these things.  Its all of that and a bowl of soup.