Connections

It's 7:45pm on Tuesday night. It has been a day. Not particularly good or bad...just another day. Cameron is running a slight fever, but mostly doesn't seem bothered by it. It just makes him sleep a lot. And, no, I'm not complaining.

I hop off the couch about 7:30pm figuring I should start dinner (and by "hop", of course I mean roll my tired, pregnant self off the heating pad permanently located on the couch and shuffle slowly to the kitchen). Hmm...what to make on Tuesday night? Ah, that good old stand-by. Soup.
I love soup. I love making soup. I have a million variations I have made up over the years, and as soon as the weather turns pleasantly chilly, I start making soup. Poor Kevin emerges in the spring slightly waterlogged from the sheer volume of soup we have consumed.

Tonight, it's split pea. What could be simpler than onion, garlic, chicken stock, and a bag of dried split peas? Picking through the peas tonight brought back memories of picking through pinto beans with my grandmother. I feel like few family gatherings passed, large or small, that didn't include a pot of beans, simmered for hours with bacon or a ham hock. And you always had to pick through the dried beans first to make sure no small stones made it into the pot. This was a perfect job for small fingers, and I was often recruited to do it. But I didn't mind, mostly. I got to do it at the table in my grandmother's kitchen, and she was there. Being in her kitchen also meant I had a good chance of licking the bowl from the oatmeal cake icing, sweet talking a piece of candy from the top of the fridge or sneaking some of her homemade peanut brittle.

And as I picked through peas in New Jersey, I thought of her all the way down in south Texas. And I missed her. But this one small pot of Tuesday night split pea soup made me feel connected to her. And grateful for her.