Vanilla Soup

(I'm actually writing this story a few hours early.  We are going to the Valley tomorrow and I won't have time to post a story before we leave, so this makes two today.  Is that cheating?)

Vanilla Soup

As a child, my favorite thing to do was listen to mom tell stories about her childhood.  She seemed to have had so much fun with her big brothers and sisters, growing up in depression era Sandy, Utah.  They didn’t have much, but they sure had happy memories.

One of the best stories mom used to tell us was about the day she and Aunt Amy, her sister just older than she and her best friend, tried to fix the soup.

Grandma Johnson, their mother, had started working at this time.  I believe she was cooking for a hotel or something.  Grandma needed to work because Grandpa was a minor and jobs were few and hard to come by, and when he had work it didn’t pay very much.  By this time Aunt Ejvor and Uncle Egon were old enough to keep an eye on mom and Amy, so Grandma would put a pot of soup on the stove to cook during the day for their supper, then go to work.  After school the big kids watched the little girls, and grandma would be home in time for supper.

On this particular day mom and Amy came in the house after school, saw the pot of soup on the back of the stove, and decided to sample it.  It wasn’t very exciting, in fact, Mom disliked soup the rest of her life because she said they seemed to have it every day when she was little and she really got tired of it.  She and Amy tried to think of a way to make the soup taste better.  They finally reasoned that their mother always put vanilla in her desserts, and they tasted delicious, so adding vanilla to the soup ought to improve its flavor.  They tried putting in a couple of teaspoons of vanilla to begin with, but it didn’t seem to make any difference, so they added a little more, then a little more, and finally just dumped in the whole bottle.  That made a huge difference, but not a good one.  When grandma Johnson got home from work that evening she discovered the doctored soup and was very unhappy!  Not only had the girls ruined the soup, they had wasted a whole bottle of vanilla.  But there was nothing that could be done about either dilemma, and since they had nothing else to eat, the vanilla soup was still their supper that night.