The Spinach Soup Story

I t was a warm spring evening. The village just started awakening after the winter. People were outside, sitting in front of their houses or working in their gardens. The sun went down, but the warm wind reminded me of the coming summer. The smell of roast peppers filled the air. I was four years old and waited for my grandmother to finish with her work in the garden and go to meet with her friends.

When I was little, my grandmother and I often visited the village where she was born. The village is 70 kilometers away from my hometown. However, I was sure that there is only one hill between the two. Even though I always went to the village either with my parents’ car or by train, I was sure that I can go there by bike. This may have been the consequence of my love of the fairytales and the big imagination that I had, or maybe it was just because I was geographically disoriented.

This evening was unusually warm for early spring. While my grandmother and I walked to her friend’s house, she told me to look around and see how beautiful the nature in spring is. I looked at the abandoned houses and their small gardens and they looked like the forest houses in the fairytales. There was some magic in them.

The magic disappeared the moment we reached the house. I liked walking to the house, but I got bored the moment my grandmother started talking with her friends. The bigger problem was that these old ladies loved asking me questions. They had a never-ending source of questions that I had to answer. These women competed with each other about whose grandchildren were smarter, whose garden was better-looking and who is was a better cook. Every time I was with my grandmother, her friends asked me the same question: “What did you eat today?” As a good girl, I had to answer. However, when I was four, I did not really pay attention to the food. For me, food was just the magical tool that would help me grow up. That’s why the ladies’ same question received exactly the same answer - “spinach soup.”

This warm spring evening wasn’t different. My grandmother’s friends did not forget about their question and I did not forget my answer. I told them that I ate spinach soup. Worried about me or just because they wanted to be the winners in their group’s competition for the best cook, the old ladies asked my grandmother if spinach soup was the only thing that she could make.

The old ladies had used me to tell my grandmother that she could not cook.

However, what really impressed me was not the reaction of the old ladies but the reaction of my grandmother. She did not start explaining that she cooked different things every day. She did not tell them anything, she just started laughing with them.

When I was a teenager, I asked my grandmother why she did not say anything and just started laughing. She told me that I was four years old and I was saying what I wanted to say. She was not ashamed of my answer and she did not want to prove herself because the most important thing for her was that I liked everything that she cooked.

This was one of the first lessons that I learned from my grandmother. She showed me that other peoples’ opinions are not important when you know that you do the things in the right way.

Today I am 21 and every time I go home my grandmother cooks a spinach soup.

Maybe I will have other spinach soup stories in future.

Ralitsa Asenova is a third-year student in the American University in Bulgaria double majoring in Journalism and Business Administration. She loves good stories and spinach soup.

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I am an anonymous writer who was raised in a dream world filled with monsters, suffering, and pain. In order to cope, I started writing to escape. -OAK