"Soup is too important"

The photo I need is the finished soup, hot and ready and in the bowl, heaped with chicken 
and carrots. But every time that was before me, I forget myself and began spooning it into my maw.

   
     Can you be offended by a grocery list? I can, though immediately realized that the ability to do so is not a good thing. But rather, a bad thing, an occasion for self-improvement. So let's begin, and own the sin.
     Last weekend, my wife was slammed by whatever virus is going around — not COVID, she took the test. But enough to confine her to bed, wiped out. I busied myself making tea and urging toast, unsuccessfully. She came down with whatever it was on Friday, slept all day Saturday.  But by Sunday had recovered enough to start issuing instructions. I had to go to the store to get essentials and "food for the week." She texted me a list. Kleenex, since she was burning through the last box. Skim milk. And then the item that raised my dandor: "Chicken noodle soup (low salt if possible)."
     Chicken noodle soup? Canned chicken noodle soup? What kind of person does she think I am? Is that what we're reduced to? Are we animals?
     The first thing she had done when she took ill was dig her homemade chicken soup out of the freezer. I boiled noodles — that she trusted me with — and saw that she spooned it into herself. But there was only one container and that was soon gone, in the first hours of her illness. Now we were to follow it up, drive the sickness off with ... what? Progresso? Out of a can? A canned soup?
     "I'll make you soup," I announced.
     Suddenly the haze of suffering lifted and she looked at me, clear-eyed and lucid. Her hard expression was like a blurry image snapping into focus. No words were spoken, but it was as if she said: "Soup? You? You'll make me soup? Is that what you're saying? Really? What do you take me for, a fool?"

      That doubled my resolve. Soup. How hard could it be? You pour water in a big pot, right? You put in, ah, the soup ingredients. Chicken must be important here — can't make chicken soup without it, right? I know that. You boil it. The result is soup. 

     Off to Sunset Foods. I got baby carrots and onions and celery — I forgot the parsnip, but those turn out to be dispensable. Back home I dug some of the vast supplies of chicken out of the freezer in the basement.
     Suddenly, she was downstairs, in the kitchen. The virus held at bay. She helped the selection of a pot — you can't just use any pot, apparently. The right pot selected, she vetted the chicken pieces to go into the pot. Not that you can just put them in — which I was about to do. No, you rinse the frozen chicken first to defrost it a bit. Separate the pieces. I almost said, "Won't they separate when you start boiling the water?" But something told me not to question the master. Nobody interrupts a master cello class with, "Mr. Casals, don't you just pull the bow back and forth over the strings?"
     What I said was:
     "I can make soup."
     "No you can't," she shot back. "Soup is too important."
     I peeled the onion; she checked that I had indeed thoroughly removed the outer brown layer and hadn't half-assed it. Into the pot. She handed me a bag of baby carrots and I poured them in. Mistake.
     "Wait a second," she said, as the carrots tumbled into the pot. Were these not the baby carrots already in the fridge? No, the new ones I just bought. I'd left them sitting on the counter. To put into the soup. She scowled — we should have used the old carrots first. I looked into the pot, wondering if I should begin plucking the carrots out, one by one. She read my mind — 34 years of marriage — and said no, they had to remain now, as they had touched the raw chicken.
     "I thought they looked too bright," she muttered, unhappily. I made a mental note to eat the half bag of baby carrots in the fridge, with hummus. They were now somehow my responsibility.

     I was allowed to cut the celery, but as I did, I felt her eyes upon me, as if she was wondering, "Can he do this right?" The pieces passed muster. And I could put the pot under the tap and turn on the water.
     She hadn't instructed me to get fresh garlic, so the shameful strategum of powdered garlic would have to do. Then there was the matter of salt. She grabbed a big blue box of rough Kosher salt and poured some into an open palm, then dumped that into the pot.
     "How much salt?" I asked, trying to keep myself involved in the process. 

     "You saw, right?" she replied. "Not too much. Not too little. Just enough."
     For the record, late in the soup making, she would allow me to taste the soup I was supposedly making, and I would add more salt. My wife couldn't taste anything.
     The soup cooked. There were more steps. The flame was adjusted. I boiled a pot of extra wide Manischewitz egg noodles — they are kept apart from the soup, added before serving, to keep them intact and to cool the soup for eating.
      We ate the soup for supper. It wasn't quite her soup — not as rich. Maybe that missing parsnip. But it wasn't bad either — and we consumed bowl after bowl. Dinner plans for Monday night were scrapped because we realized we still had soup left, and two bowls are a meal. The rest we froze as insurance against future illness.
      Only after did I realize that my making the soup had not been the welcome act of a concerned husband trying to nurse his ill wife back to health, but a species of rudeness, prodding a sick woman to get up and make us soup. I would rush to reassure her that, of course it goes without saying that my soup wasn't 100 percent — it needed dark meat — but what she generously deemed, "perfectly fine soup." Honestly, I don't believe we'll ever speak of it  again. The soup, for want of a better term, that I attempted to make is in the freezer, and this near-soup will be consumed at some point, probably to ward off the cold of February. But soon after that I expect to find the freezer magically jammed with plastic containers of actual, properly-prepared soup, deep yellow broth, so we are never again caught short in a time of sickness and forced to take desperate measures.