It was foggy with a bit of drizzle dripping from the air as I walked along Wildcat Boulevard the other day. I was thinking about food as I walked along.
Perhaps I was thinking about food because I had read that January is National Soup Month. I have always liked soup. When I was a kid my mother served it often. She liked Campbell’s alphabet soup, vegetable beef, chicken noodle, and tomato soup.
Still, her favorite was homemade soup. The base of my mother’s soup was beef chunks, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and onion slices. It was fine.
When I was in the fourth grade I came down with a terrible disease called yellow jaundice. My understanding is that a person’s liver even swells up with this disease. I recall it began with a really bad stomachache and then I could not keep any food down.
At first, my parents thought I had a bad case of the flu. The sickness lingered and I became sicker and sicker. So they bundled me up and took me off to see our family doctor.
He knew right away what I had. He said it had been going around just like a cold or flu. Some kids got it, some didn’t. He prescribed Coca-Cola syrup to help me keep food down. He gave my dad a small glass bottle and told him to buy some Coca-Cola syrup at the bowling alley. The bowling alley had one of those pop machines that dispensed pop in a wax-covered cup. Somehow the machine mixed a syrup and fizz water together.
The syrup helped me keep some food down, but the only thing that really stayed down were the carrots from my mother’s homemade soup. She made a batch of it every day with extra carrots and, after a few days, I began to recover.
We have soup quite often in our house during the colder months. My wife makes hers without cabbage and adds tomato juice when it is about ready to eat. It is almost a stew instead of a soup.Whatever, it is delicious.
But back to my walk. I have seen the old wide white-striped skunk again on my walks. He does not seem to be afraid of me, so I give him a wide berth. He is large, so I suspect he is a male. Whatever, he is a handsome guy.
