Leaf Soup | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Leaf Soup | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marlene Bonney
11/15/15
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It is late autumn. I watch, fascinated, as the multi-colored leaves rain down from tree branches like fluttering gigantic snowflakes. Their stubborn relatives hang onto their perches up above, proud not to have given in to the wind’s cross-current demands. Like many humans, they are comfortable in their present state and have no desire to be disturbed. Some of them, though, wistfully watch the freedom of their air-borne counterparts taking the plunge with joy and grace.

The crisp wind dies down, the ground now blanketed by the dying leaves which will be laced with frost by the next morning’s dawn. But, for now, they continue to accumulate into spasmodic piles, hills and valleys. My 4-yr.-old granddaughter, Elizabeth, comes over to play in them, her city apartment complex courtyard bereft of trees. She frolics like a young colt, kicking the leaves helter-skelter and giggles as they swirl into gusty circles through the air. She has become a cyclic tornado as she twirls, her outstretched arms catalysts to the funnels caused by her feet stirring the leaves into a kaleidoscope of showers.

I continue to re-rake the escaping ones back into her mixing bowl, while Ellie, now prostrate, tries to make snow angels on the ground.

“Grammie, let’s make leaf soup!”

“Huh?”

She runs over to a forlorn flowerless clay pot in the corner of the yard, clinging leaves sticking all over her energetic body like flies to tarpaper.

“You know, Leaf Soup,” insistent I join her in this nonsensical whim.

I am game, as always, to feed her thriving imagination, willing myself to become a young child again. My arthritic joints, however, protest as we gather handfuls from her mountain stash and stuff them into her mixing bowl.

“We need a spoon, Grammie,” rejecting the stick I had selected from the woodpile nearby.

She waits impatiently on the porch steps--thinking (correctly) that if she joins me inside, I will distract her from her mission--while I rush into the kitchen for a plastic spoon.

“No, Grammie, not that one—it’s not big enough! The RED one!”

I return to the kitchen and rummage through the gadget drawer, eventually returning to her with a tomato-sauce stained ladle. She pouts and, with tiny demanding hands on hips, marches into the kitchen as I trail behind her like a follow-the-leader participant.

“I want THAT one!” pointing to the wall above the stove where my great-grandmother’s hand-painted decorative porcelain spoon resides.

I stand next to her, my precious granddaughter, my eyes darting from her adorably defiant face to the antique relic of bygone days that has never been used.

“You know, honey,” crouching down to bring my face to hers for emphasis, “that one is very special and we wouldn’t want to get it all dirty,” thankfully remembering a previous tea-party scenario when she didn’t want real tea to stain her miniature cups.

“Pa-LEEZE?” her pleading eyes melting my heart, as usual, so I remove the red hand-painted, delicate, old spoon and gingerly place it in her outstretched hand.

“I am SUCH a push-over,” I mentally berate myself as her facial expression changes to the exact same caricature of her mother’s 4-yr.-old face gazing up at me.

We go back outside, hand-in-hand, her other hand tightly ensconced around the spoon handle while my other hand splays over my fainting heart. Some of the pot’s topmost leaves have blown off, so we collect more, pressing them firmly into the tiny chef’s caldron. As gently as a little tyke can, Elizabeth stirs her concoction, overflowing leaves spilling over. Ever so delicately, she holds up a tattered burnt leaf perching on my great-grandmother’s spoon.

“Here, Grammie, taste my soup!”

I pretend to take a huge bite, smacking my lips for special effects.

“No, not like THAT! Like THIS,” as she crunches the offering between her pearly baby teeth.

I suppress a shudder as I watch her swallow. I imagine the disgusting crackle between my false teeth and the who-knows-what else that would happen to my finicky digestive system if the masticated leaf enters my body.

My daughter’s Ford Escape drives into my graveled driveway in the nick of time. She approaches us with a smile. Until she sees her great-great grandmother’s hand-painted porcelain spoon clutched in her daughter’s grubby little hand, leaf droppings hanging over it’s edges.

“MOM, REALLY?!” incredulous eyebrows climb into her hairline.

I anticipate a mini-sermon on the dangers of spoiling grandchildren in the near future.

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