Ham Bone Soup: Exploring Metaphors

 


    Ham bone soup became an after Christmas tradition about a decade ago.  My roommate at the time had a leftover Honey Baked ham that we placed in the crockpot with a package of 15 beans and an extreme amount of sugar and glaze.  God-fucking-damnit!—AMAZING!  I copied the recipe and made it after the holiday every year since.

    What started out simple became more complex over the years, adding ingredients as life grew as complicated as the flavor of the soup.  Each year, no matter how simple or how complex, it is always a crowd pleaser.  But it never tastes the same.  With each passing year, the flavor changes as life changes.  In life, as with cooking, you add and subtract.  You gain people and lose people; you add ingredients and you remove some.  One year there was just ham and beans and sugar.  The next year suddenly onions came out of nowhere; another, hot sauce and stock instead of water, brown sugar instead of white.  I can’t remember the number of ingredients over the years.  They have come and gone, been replaced and added to.

    There were people and places in my life this time last year who aren’t here now.  People and places a decade past who dance about the corners of my memories like phantom shadows.  Just like there are ingredients in my soup that aren’t there this year.  But for everything that was lost, there is something new.  This year I incorporated kale.  It wasn’t here last year, but it’s good and healthy for you.  Such is life.  You lose something, you gain something.  Maybe what you lost was toxic and what you gained is something good and wholesome?  

    Everyone loved my soup this year.  It was as complex as my life.  Ingredients were missing; things were added.  It didn’t taste the same.  But you can’t focus on what was lost.  Or even what you gained.  Focus on the marrow, what life tastes like on the tip of the tongue.  Like the soup, it tastes sweet—that one pervading constant that has never changed from my recipe and never will.  Life tastes sweet when you savor the flavor and focus on what you always had all along.

    Satan bless us, each and everyone…   


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