Friday afternoon I was driving home from school. It had been a pretty chilly day and since I have a room outside of the school, I had spent the better part of the day walking in and out of the cold. By 3:30, I was frozen solid and nowhere close to getting used to the sensation. So it was with great relief that I hopped in the car, turned the heat up to 90, tried to thaw out.
I began to think of ways to warm myself from the inside out. There were fantasies of hot tea and hot chocolate. Then I thought of soup. Yummy hot soup in flavors like mushroom, cream of crab and french onion. I wanted something hearty, warm, and fulfilling.
At some point in the middle of my chain reaction thinking, I remembered a soup that Amanda and I used to make--girl soup. It's kind of funny that my mind went there since this is not a warm soup, or even one that has liquid in it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why we called it girl soup when it could have had any of a number of other names.
The first girl soup was made about ten years ago. Mark and I were in Michigan for Amanda's confirmation; I was her sponsor. We were there a few days early so there was plenty of time to hang out. We went to the mall, watched TV, visited her grandmother in the nursing home, and just talked. It was nice.
Amanda is a crafty person and she has been making her own jewelery for years. On this particular trip, I noticed a really pretty lucite bracelet that she was wearing. When I got closer to it, I noticed that it wasn't lucite at all but rather a toothbrush that had been bent and painted. Well, I needed one of those so we took off to Rite Aid to get the necessary supplies.
At some point on that shopping trip, we found ourselves in the candy aisle and we picked a few (like twenty or so) bags of assorted candy. Things are fuzzy after ten years but I think the reasoning behind that was that we needed variety. And variety we achieved. There were chocolate pieces and gummy things. there were suckers and pixie sticks. All of the various and sundry candy groups were represented in our selections.
We checked out with a basket of ten or so toothbrushes and twenty bags of candy. The look on the cashier's face was priceless. I have no idea what she thought we were up to but she thought something and giggled the whole time she rang us through. I'm sure we were the talk of the Rite Aid that night.
Back at Amanda's house, we lined up the candy, put on a pot of water to boil, and began opening toothbrushes. We began to realize that we were taking up a lot of space and that it was cumbersome to open and close each bag of candy. So we grabbed a big bowl and dumped everything in. It really did look like a silly soup of different colors, shapes and textures. And since we were girls, it only made sense that this new concoction be called girl soup.
My favorite part of the first girl soup weekend occured a few mornings later. After Mark, Amanda and I were awake, we went downstairs and found Amanda's brother Bryan passed out on the couch, his arms wrapped around the soup.
"Bryan, what are you doing?" Amanda demanded. "That's girl soup."
He rolled over and very sleepily said, "It's boy soup now."
When Amanda and Erik were her a few weeks ago, mark asked if we were going to make girl soup. It was almost at the same time that we said no. There would be no more girl soup since both of us were trying to be healthy. What a sad, sad moment. Maybe one day in the future Amanda and I will make healthy girl soup with granola and dried fruit. Who knows.
I guess I'll be settling for some hot soup like chicken noodle or vegetable. That would be so good right now that I'm cold.
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