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I come from a soup family. As soon as the weather turned cold, the house where I grew up smelled of soup.
My mother constantly turned leftovers into soup. Vegetables became vegetable soup, pot roast became beef barley soup and a chicken dinner was turned into chicken soup with wide, hand cut noodles. She also made chili with the tomatoes and chili sauce that she canned in the fall.
Maxine loved all those soups. Whenever we dined out, she began her meal with soup. I brought her chicken noodle soup from Busch’s, a local grocery store chain when she was in rehab following a fall in late 2018.
When she came home, she ate a can of Progresso soup or soup that my brother made every day for lunch. (Wednesday marks the second anniversary of her death, and I’ll be thinking about her.)
My favorite soup was not my mother’s soup, however, although she was with me when I first tasted it.
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