Saturday, October 23, 2010

A True Lover of Soup

This is a very special Sunday Soup post. I come by my love of soup honestly. It's generational. Over the last few years, my grandmother has lived on her own, but not really been up to cooking much. Whenever I visited her, I would make her a big pot of soup and put it in small containers for her freezer because she loved nothing more than a bowl of soup for dinner.

A couple of years ago, my aunt and uncle bought my grandmother a machine that allowed me to email her copies of this blog and then it would print out for her automatically. No computer, no new learning curve, just a weekly update of Sunday Soup. She saved them all in a three ring binder. She loved the blog so much, whenever I knew I'd be going down to Portland, I'd start saving one bowl out of each Sunday Soup and freeze it, then I would take a cooler full of frozen soup for her so she could enjoy all the soups she'd only read about.

Yesterday, Grandma passed away after a short battle with pneumonia. One of the very last things she ate was a bowl of tomato soup. I'm sorry to say it wasn't mine, but I did see her last week, and she was eating soup then too. She was so proud of my book being published, even the nurses knew about it. I always joke that there are two things in my family a person can do to make everyone else proud...be a major league baseball player, or write a book. I think in Grandma's eyes, a good pot of soup also gave you a certain status. It's sad to think I won't be sending her anymore Sunday Soup blog posts, but when my mum asked me if I wanted her collection of SS posts back, my aunt said quickly, "I want that!" so maybe now I'll send the posts to my aunt instead.

Please join me in raising a bowl of soup to one great lady.

Norma Tommerup
1922-2010