leeks

C. showed up on my doorstep last night, fresh from a weekend trip to North Dakota. Her grandparents had transformed her sedan into a produce truck, and she bestowed much bounty upon us. Pumpkins, cantaloupes, watermelons, gourds. Tomatoes, fresh, canned, and juiced. Salsa and cherry jam. Homemade pumpkin pie made from her grandma’s pumpkins. Peppers both hot and mild. Freshly dug red potatoes. Leeks complete with full stalks, roots, and dirt. We hauled a huge tote bag and a full garbage bag of stuff up the stairs to my kitchen.
Today I had pie for breakfast and set to making leek and potato soup. I make it several times each year, but it’s been awhile since I’ve worked with whole, entire leeks. I sheared off the tops and the hanging roots last night and then mopped the dirt off the counters and floors. Today I pared more from the bottom and tops, rinsed and rinsed and rinsed, and then chopped them up. All the while, I kept thinking of my grandparents’ leek patch back in Arkansas.
I doubt it exists anymore, since grandpa moved out years ago. It was underneath a gumball tree that bordered the back field, and it was somehow very mysterious. I’m not sure why, but when I was small I could never remember what was planted there. Grandma would always look at me funny and say, “You know that’s leeks.” She would haul the huge, filthy things up to the patio for trimming, and then inside for soup. The trimmings always went into the compost piles. The soup did not go into Kristas, even though it was offered every time. “You used to like this,” she said. “We would make it for you and bring it over in a thermos when you were sick. Some days it was the only thing you would eat.” When you were sick meant when you had meningitis. I barely remember anything from the months after I came home from the hospital, but I do remember her coming by often with my great-grandmother. I did not eat leeks after that. I didn’t eat many things I associated with being that ill.
It wasn’t until long after both of them passed on that I was paging through a cookbook looking for something different to make and happened upon a recipe for leek and potato soup. I had forgotten that she made it for me, forgotten what it tasted like, forgotten that I refused it all those years after. I made it and gave some to Mom. It was good. I keep making it, sometimes from different recipes but most often freehand. I refine it, trying to find the essence of the leeks. If I try hard enough, perhaps I’ll also uncover the essence of grandma, a middle-aged woman preparing a cure the best way she knew how, bottling soup and crossing the river to me.