Kristin Hale

January 28, 2008

     Chop, chop, chop.

     My mother’s knife slices through the bright orange carrots. She has peeled potatoes, sliced onions, diced cabbage and shelled peas. The smell of the beef simmering fills the whole house and makes everyone hungry.

     It is the end of summer and the windows are all open, catching the evening breeze and letting the shafts of light from the setting sun slant across the cracked linoleum kitchen floor.

     I sit on a barstool helping Mom snap the green beans my dad and I picked from the garden earlier that day. Despite the summer heat being almost gone, the garden is still producing more than our little family can use.

     This is my favorite time of year.

     My mother adds the vegetables to the fragrant broth and covers it with a lid. Now we wait. I go and sit out in the rocking chairs on the back porch with my dad, listening to the last purple martens. We had spent the summer watching the babies grow up, and now they chirp and chatter to one another, planning a big trip they’re about to take, my dad tells me.

     My sister and I swing on our swing-set my dad made for us, right beside the playhouse he built for my fifth birthday.

     Watch us jump, Daddy!

     We jump off just when the swing reaches the furthest outward, flying into the purples and pinks that the sky has become. Then we chase fireflies, putting the ones we catch in the jar daddy keeps on the picnic table. We watch them light up, just like the millions of stars that blink and smile at us from above.

     Dinner’s ready! Go wash up!

     We hear my mother call and we run inside, laughing when Daddy puts his hands on top of ours under the running water, stealing it away.

     Our meal that night is homemade vegetable beef soup and cornbread. We don’t need anything else. The vegetables are fresh from our garden; the beef is from one of the steers we butchered in the spring.

      I eat mine right when Mom puts it in the bowl, even though she warns me to wait. It is hot. I burn my tongue and have to take a drink of the sun tea my sister and I made earlier.

      I dive right back in, leaving the chunks of beef, eating the different vegetables, green beans first, then peas. Cabbage follows, carrots, and potatoes. The savory beef pieces, slightly salty, are my favorite part, and I save those for last.

     Plssssss. Blup.

     The pressure cooker hisses and clangs away, making everyone in the house talk louder to be able to hear. Mom fills large mason jars with the vegetable beef soup, puts a lid on, and with her yellow tongs, places the jar in the boiling water.

     Several large jars are already cooling on the counter, ready to be stored in the dark cabinet by the sink. When it is cold and blustery in the winter, we will be able to open a jar and have my favorite soup for dinner, a reminder of warmer days and the freedom summers holds.