This year, I’m going to make a lot of soup.

A story about shortcuts.

These days, when people ask how any of the tender, important things in my world are going- the book I have coming out, the marriage I embarked on, the next year’s worth of essays I set out to create on this Substack- I tell them, it’s going well. It’s coming along. It’s stone soup.

Stone soup, I say, when they peer at me to check I’m not having a stroke. Like the story?

I thought everyone knew that story. Apparently not. It goes like this: