Today's a soup-making day. It's a federal holiday -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- and everyone's home. There's no sale to rush off to, no church service to attend. The TV programming execs have no marathons planned, unlike on New Years' Eve, when The Three Stooges and The Twilight Zone face off every year. We haven't spent days planning and buying and cooking some special commemorative meal to be served on the wedding china. There are no dinner guests expected, arriving, or calling to tell us they'll be late.
There's just me and The Rev and my pot of turkey and vegetable soup. I don't use a recipe, only a kit from the supermarket containing root vegetables, some celery, and some fresh herbs I can't identify because I have very little sense of smell. I think about the flavor profile I'm going for, and add a dash of this, a pinch of that. I am a very good cook and a terrible baker. Cooking, for me, is intuition. Baking is chemistry, and I decisively flunked chemistry a quarter century ago.
As I cut and chop and season the boiling turkey meat, left over from Christmas dinner, I have an actual conversation with my husband.
It's hard to explain how extraordinary that is. You see, we have three children, whom I shall identify as Boy, Doodle, and Scooby. (That's what we really do call them, and I promise I will expand on that topic some other time.) They, like children everywhere, are little black holes of attention. Every moment is, for them, an opportunity to be front and center in the minds of their parents -- except at those times when we are superfluous and unwanted. They are bundles of self-absorption: I want you to be there when I want you, and when I don't, to go away.
But this Monday morning at half past eleven, the two younger ones, Doodle and Scooby, are engrossed downstairs in some video game, the goal of which I cannot understand no matter how many times they try to enlighten me, and Boy, who is fourteen, is, of course, still sleeping.
And I realize as I chop vegetables that I cannot remember the last time The Rev and I were able to have a grown up conversation that was not (1) under cover of darkness in the middle of the night, or (2) simultaneously costing us ten dollars an hour in babysitting fees.
I add carrots and parsnips and turnips to the pot, and watch as they bump against the onions and celery in the boiling water. I mentally calculate the nutritional value of each ingredient, and in deference to The Rev's new eating plan, try to figure out how many Weight Watchers points this would translate to. I concentrate on the sound of my husband's voice, the deep bass, reveling in the uninterruptedness of it. It wraps around me, warm as the steam coming off of the bubbling soup.
This is intimacy. The quiet conversation of spouses, about things both important and mundane. Little moments of his day, stored up in that mental box marked, Things To Tell My Wife, If I Get A Chance, received by me with interest, and transferred to a basket I've labeled, Stuff That Is Important To My Husband. On a busier day, he might not have a chance to share some passing anecdote to make me laugh, or I might be too involved in the thousand logistical details of making the house run to pay more than superficial attention to the story. Just about any other day, our conversation would be punctuated by the semi-colons and ellipses of other voices, tears, arguments, or demands for attention, and the narrative, half-told, would eventually drift off into the silence of incompletion, with a hand wave and a muttered, "Never mind, it wasn't important."
But right now, today, we have the luxury of cooking hearty soup from scratch in our kitchen and letting our conversation meander where it will go. Nothing we speak about this morning is earth-shattering; we are not deciding the fate of nations, or even of the family. No, we are simply sharing a moment -- unstressed, unpressed -- as two people who used to take these moments for granted, before we were two plus three.
Soon enough, though, perhaps inevitably, a howl of frustration rises from the basement. The animated foe has won one too many rounds. We glance, startled, at the clock and realize we've had an entire hour of nothing but our own adult voices, uninterrupted. It's time to wake up Boy, time to get some housework done, time to let the soup simmer.
It's a quiet intimacy, a middle of the day, talk about stuff that's on your mind but really nothing important, I remember who you are and why I love you kind of intimacy. It warms me just as thoroughly as a bowl of homemade turkey and vegetable soup on a cold January day.
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