Good Soup

An image of a steaming bowl of soup follows me this week, taunts at my heels. Really, the last time I cook with any gusto I'm eight.

Spring Creek Road crosses the Rock River at the heart of my town. Keep going east to the laid out neighborhoods, up the hill some. I'm at the top of Northview Road, behind my garage, knee deep in mud. I smoosh fat berries in dugout holes with a stone pestle. Black purple streaks for the cheeks. Pummel dandelion heads enough and that makes yellow across the biceps. Old ketchup from the glove compartment, red dot in the middle of the brow, even then. In the lap of the conservative Midwest, I am a native Indian - Blackhawk, from the encyclopedia. Loincloth and spear, I run between wood-paneled station wagons, parked symmetrically along the block of driveways.

In the morning I shape balls of dirt side by side by side along a grey foundation wall. When I'm ready I sit on each one, flatten, giggle, and then finish with a rolling pin. Pancakes. Some are plates, pinched with thumb and first finger. A few cups, shaped from plates wrapped around my fist and cinched at the gaps. Smoothing cracks from the surface, I lay them out to dry, as the sun peeks around the corner of the roof. Timing is everything.

Dirt remains become ears of corn. With my tools - whittled sticks - I carve kernels, plump as possible. I crack open mustard from the glove compartment, and with watercolor brushes change the fate of brown to ochre earth. By mid-afternoon I put a few in my satchel, run across proper lawns, over back fences, through spindly bush trails, down to the creek. Time to catch fish for dinner.

Fifty throws from all the surrounding boulders, my corn searing in the sun, I never leave with anything except sunburn.

Some time later, around the pregnant pause at dusk, where the sky turns a shade of lavender, I run home in soft light, hungry.

I don't know what my mom's doing all day. Gardening, painting, drinking with the ladies. Hit or miss, but she's mostly always drinking and laughing with the ladies, like they've been there already, wherever there is, done that already, but I don't know what's done. Not dinner.

I know every configuration of Swanson's TV dinners. Stouffer’s, too. The way the side corn spills into the pudding, and the apple pie thing dries out at the corners. Salisbury steak is always funnier to repeat than to eat. But the peas make everything worth it - if you have white bread with butter. Dump the hot square of peas and watch butter run. Outrun that by folding fast, then bite.

Tricks of the trade.

Between the styrofoam style of Lucky Charms, soggy Fruit Loops, and the decorative potential of cheese whiz, I don't see my mother ever make a pot of soup. She delivers dinner to the table, heavy clanks, pissed off about something, and we don't look at each other, my dad and me. There's a stiff price to pay for laughing at frozen food.

She goes to her chair in the corner, small salad plate balanced on grass green robe, and eats her portion of Lean Cuisine. Sometimes fancier frozen: Chicken Kiev.

Illinois has lots of black dirt, and, used to be, farms from here to there. But I think that vegetables come from a can at the Highlander grocery store. I shuck bags and bags of corn on the back stoop every summer, but I still think it comes from the can.

The only thing that grows from dirt I make with my own hands, and that never fills my tummy.

When I leave home at seventeen, led to a Native American clan, I instantly become a vegetarian, then vegan. New Age practitioner extraordinaire. When I'm not on the land building sweat lodges, I'm holed up by the din of TV in the dark, scarfing Pringles, and microwaving Stouffer’s Tuna Casserole for nostalgia.

I try to cook for my first husband. I even make Pad Thai (whew hew). But when I drive away from that, tail lights over mixing bowls, cooking takes another back seat.

Now I feed my kid organic packaged food. Perfect. Did I mention the middle door?

And remember the voluptuous black woman whom I have passed a few times on the sidewalk in front of my writing cafe? She passes outside, drops something in front of my window here, and glances at me with a smile. Her T-shirt says Take Off the Mask. And suddenly, she is that cat from the Matrix. (Orpheus yells: Did you see it once or twice?) I'm about to catch something meaningful but can't do it. That road sign is in the rear view mirror already. I'm just laughing, listening to Springsteen impale: The door's open but the ride it ain't free.

Ha. Just remembered that my father used to always say (in response to my explorations), "If it doesn't grow corn, I don't want to hear it." Tip my hat to dad this morning (bless his soul). What good are all these words when I don't know how to make good soup?