"Red Soup," by Ann Nelson

“Your grandma ate this during the depression,” Mom says as she stirs the vat of red soup on the stove, “very frugal.” 

Red soup is the amalgamation of water, crushed tomatoes, beef bone marrow, celery, onion, salt, and acini de pepe. All the ingredients are lovingly tossed into the large, old pot that used to belong to my mother’s mother. It holds the weight of the days when grandma was its dearest friend. When she passed on in the living room, this piece of her was scooped into my mothers arms and brought to the stove. 

I never see Mom cry, I watch her carry on without ever even dropping her chin. I like to imagine that tucked underneath her collected demeanor, I’d find the side of Mom that I can’t name, staring at the pot like it’s grandma in the flesh. I imagine that it beckons her to come closer, to share in family tradition in substitute of a hug. It’s the same part of Mom who never liked banana pudding ice cream, grandma's favorite, but let it freeze her mouth for weeks anyway; her grief pooling somewhere in between her tongue and pursed lips. 

To cook red soup: simmer for eight hours, strain, and serve until the soul is mended. Don’t forget to remind everyone that grandma ate this during the depression, and don’t forget to say the key words. 

“Very frugal,” but the way Mom says it. The way grandma probably said it for decades before you were born. The voice goes up an octave or so. Next, scrunch your eyebrows, nod your head and smirk ever so slightly from the left corner of your mouth.

After hearing it so many times, I adopted the phrase as my own. Everyone that I brought into our home, I told on the car ride there, 

“My mom is making a family recipe. My grandma ate it during the depression,” pause, and then in Mom’s exact tone, “it’s very frugal.”

At the dinner table, soup steam climbs up my nose and onto my glasses. Mom recites the mantra at my friends, while they pretend I hadn’t just told them. Now that grandma isn’t around, I give Mom every chance to talk about her. 

My mother’s mother is gone, but I still feel her at this table. I still feel her when I see the pot on the stove, when I see a bluebird, and when Mom shows me years later that losing her wasn’t as easy as she made it look. 

“I would say, Mom if you can hear me, squeeze my hand,” she said on a car ride to the grocery store, “she never squeezed my hand.”

She said it casually, like how she said she couldn’t watch another person die. Or how she told me that on the car ride back from grandma’s living room, she had to pull off the highway to cry. She said it casually, but I thought I heard her voice shake ever so slightly. I felt the iron wall waver and knew for the first time exactly who I was talking to.

My mother has the strength of a true mother, but when we talk like this, when she makes me red soup, I meet her as the truest daughter, reaching to find her mother in any way that she can, reaching for the soup bowl that will mend her soul.