Julie's Special Soup

Julie has been my older sister for all of my fifty-nine years. She was the city mouse while I was the country mouse. She worked in the same office for over twenty-three years while I raised a family. She went to plays, I kept dogs and chickens, and although we kept in touch, I rarely got to the city and she hadn’t been upstate in years. Three years ago, she experienced a midlife crisis that brought her to her knees. She has lived alone her adult life, dealing on and off with depression, so when she buckled, she didn’t reach out for help. Knowing that were I to ask her if she needed help she would say no, I made my way down to the city, a hundred thirty miles away, and showed up at her door on New Year’s eve. It was to be the beginning of a new relationship between us. For the next six months I regularly traveled to the city on the weekends in order to clean and shop, do her laundry and keep her from the shame of no longer being able to keep the standards we had been raised with. Together we worked out using up her sick leave and taking early retirement. Eventually she had to be hospitalized, and we always joke how lucky she was that it occurred during a heat wave. But Jul needed a support system and I knew that I actually couldn’t be that system for her, so our next challenge was to find one.
My brothers, sisters and Aunt who all live far away chipped in and we got her a laptop, which meant she could order from Fresh Direct and have her groceries delivered to her apartment, as well as receive and send email. That was really something because she rarely answered her phone. Her good friend since college, Maryanne, helped her home from the hospital and made sure her cobra payments were covered, all the while giving her much loving support as well as her neighbor Janice who kept her in library books and took out her mail. It was heartening how many other people rallied around her. She had made so many friends over the years. My son, who lives in Brooklyn, bought her an air-conditioner and with the help of his handsome friend Flannery, installed it in her bedroom, and then through one of those serendipitous connections, a neighbor from upstate with a practice in the city gave her a two-hour session, gratis, and recommended a good therapist who lived in her neighborhood. It was slow going but through her therapist she found a psychiatrist who made home visits and a year ago she began medication.
The thing is that we had come from a troubled childhood, and on those Sunday mornings, in the last hours of our visit, we always found ourselves reminiscing on the past; her memories, mine: the good and the bad. One of the consequences of this past has been a reluctance to turn to God. He hadn’t appeared to listen then and besides, we had so often been punished in his name that there didn’t seem to be much point. So on my latest visit, it was with interest that I observed both of us tentatively exploring the deep wish within ourselves that we could be more like those people who openly trust in a higher power. It’s a beginning, or it could be the end, of a long journey home.
And speaking of home, this sister of mine who has always lived alone, asked me this time in a round about way: “Had she made a home?” I thought about the scrumptious soup we had shared the night before with the French baguette I always pick up, the sweet feeling of arriving at a place that I could claim as a family home, the pleasure of relaxing in a clean, comfortable environment with someone I had shared my childhood with, the new found intimacy we had established these past three and a half years, and realized that my older sister had more than made a home, she had come home.

Julie’s Special Soup:
One can: Progresso Chicken Noodle soup
One can: cannellini beans
One small can: sweet corn
One pack: frozen broccoli cuts
Put all ingredients into a saucepan and let simmer one half hour, serve with grated Parmesan cheese…and a fresh baguette.