Saturday Night Soup: Cleaning the Refrigerator in my Mind

When you sat down with my family for the last meal before Sunday morning, you pretty much knew what was coming. Mother would walk toward us from the old cook stove armed in one hand with a large kettle and flourishing a ladle in the other. We waited in uneasy expectation. It was Saturday soup night and Mother had cleaned the refrigerator. So begins another collection of Polly Rogers Brown's memories of life from the early 1940's to the present, told in rich detail with warmth and humor. From first and fleeting love as a flat-chested, gawky girl to fifty-six years of marriage to her beloved Wayne, Polly paints her life in everyday shades which create a gentle canvas of warmth and joy. Just as her mother cleaned the old Frigidaire and made Saturday night soup with the leftovers, so has Polly cleaned the compartments of her mind, presenting the bits and pieces in a literary pot filled with the leftovers of her life, her own Saturday night soup.