A Pot of Chicken Soup

It is a chicken soup kind of day today, with light rain, cooler temperatures and grey skies. While I write this and smell my soup aroma drifting across the air, my mind drifts back to being back home in Crystal Falls, Michigan, on our family farm, when I wore a younger ladies clothes.


We had one of those wonderful old cream and pale green colored wood burning stoves that were one of man's best inventions , to my mind. It made our house a cozy home with all those wonderful features. The wood stove gave warmth, for family and for our little dog, Laddie, who always ran to curl up under the stove on a cold winter day. There was a double warming oven, and a water reservoir, so there was always warm water if needed.


Atop the stove, a tea kettle was always ready for a warm cup of cocoa or tea. That was especially good, when we came back from sleigh riding or skiing down our hill on a cold winter day. Whenever we came home from school, the kitchen was filled with such good smells of soup simmering on the stove or bread baking in the oven. Also, if the day was really windy and cold, we just opened the oven door to let out that wonderful heat.


As children, we always had jobs to do that centered around our stove. There was kindling to split, ashes to carry out and filling the reservoir with water. It was good to have a sense of being a needed person in the core of a family. Our efforts and time were all bound together in the circle of love that binds a family in the activities that makes a house a home.


Like little birds in a nest needing their mother's protection and care, children also need to feel the security and love of caring parents, somebody to shelter them from the big wide world beyond the walls of a home. I am blessed to have been a child growing up in simpler times within the sheltering care of loving parents who taught us the value of working and playing together even in the throes of the Depression and the difficult years that followed. We were content with the simple things that we shared, like listening to the radio at night , after chores were done, or going for a ride and getting a nickel ice cream cone. Those were highlights to our days because we did them together, as family. How lucky we were to be so loved in that long ago time, sometimes called the olden days. But no, I would say they were the golden days of yesteryear.


Out of even the rainy, grey days can come happy thoughts when there is a pot of chicken soup cooking on the stove. Enjoy!