Soup that says I love you

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In "The French Laundry Cookbook," Thomas Keller tells us that his mentor Roland Henin once said, "If you're a really great cook, you can travel back in time." I know exactly what he means. Sometimes it happens when you least expect it. You put a chicken in a pot, and there you are, decades back and thousands of miles away.

Before I came to live in Washington, I spent two years on top of a mountain in Arizona. I had dropped out of college for a while and gone to work at a ramshackle little ski resort just north of Tucson.

I lived in a village called Summerhaven, with 93 other villagers and 114 dogs. One thin, curling black ribbon of highway connected us to Tucson to the south, and one impossibly rocky road on the "backside" connected us to a mining town called Oracle to the north. At night, when the desert was empty, the lights of towns far away were all that we could see of civilization, and the stars were brighter than the lights below.

Because I didn't have a car in those days, I used to ride from time to time to Tucson with friends from work. One of my best friends, Barbara Babasa, had grown up in Tucson, and her grandparents still lived in the old barrio of South Tucson. On Valentine's Day in 1978 or 1979, I went with Barbara to visit them. Houses there were painted in a hundred different pastel shades. There were mint-green houses, and pink ones, and yellow and orange. Most of the houses had brightly colored gardens, too, with clumps of garish marigolds and crazy old bougainvillea vines around little shrines for St. Francis and the Madonna. One of the shrines was an old bathtub planted upright in the ground to create a kind of grotto.

The winter desert was mild and, compared to the thin mountain air to which our lungs were accustomed, the flowery air was thick and delicious. When we arrived, Nana, Barbara's grandmother, was trying to feed Tata, her grandfather, but he wouldn't open his mouth to take the soup. Tata had wandered off that day and been lost for hours. Nana was angry with him for wandering off; he was angry with her for making him come home.

Afraid that he had been killed or hospitalized, or otherwise humiliated, Nana had tried desperately to find him and now that he was home, she wanted to care for him but was still upset.

"I don't know if I can take care of him anymore," she said in Spanish, or words to that effect. "It's too much for me."

"No te preocupe Nana," said Barbara. "Not to worry. He's home now."

She explained to me that Tata wandered away often, and Nana, who was losing her eyesight, had to depend on the neighbors. The situation was getting unbearable. "He doesn't talk anymore, and now he doesn't want to eat."

It wasn't clear how Tata felt about any of this. But he seemed aware of the conversation. He gave me a long imploring look as if to say, "What can I do?" Maybe it was just to say, "Who are you?"

Nana stopped trying to feed Tata to tell Barbara everything that had led to Tata's disappearance, and everything that had transpired between his return and the time we arrived.

It came in a long flood of Spanish that I couldn't follow, so I looked around the room, and my eyes stopped on what must have been Nana and Tata's wedding picture. Taken sometime in the late '20s or early '30s, the sepia-toned picture hung in an ornate frame against the stucco wall of the living room. Serious and beautiful, the young couple in black and white bore little resemblance to the people before me.

Then the phone rang. I picked up the odd words, Corazon en el cielo, "heart in the sky," and followed the little family onto the front lawn. A neighbor had called to tell Nana and Tata to look outside at "the sign."

Outside, people were standing in their front yards and everyone was looking at the sky, which had taken on the deep blue that meant sunset was coming. One cloud picked up the magenta red light of the evening sun, and that one cloud was shaped very much like a heart. Nana held Tata's hand and asked him if he saw it. He didn't answer but he was looking straight at it and she nodded for him.

All up and down that wide, quiet street the gardens took on a brilliance in the evening light that made the green cactus glow, the yellow marigolds blaze, and the red bougainvillea sparkle. The little grottos with their gaudy saints were as regal as cathedrals and many of the old people, and the young ones, too, were making the sign of the cross.

Then the light faded and everyone drifted back toward their doors. In the wake of the little miracle, Nana filled bowls for all of us with chicken soup and heated hand-made tortillas in a dry cast-iron pan. 'And to think it was on Valentine's Day," she said. Tata was seated in his upholstered chair and Nana placed a kitchen chair in front of the TV tray between them. She held out the spoon and he opened his mouth.

"Te amo," she said to him, "I love you." And staring steadily and silently into her eyes, he took the soup.

I'm not sure what dishes sent Roland Henin or his young protoge back in time, but I know exactly what dish takes me back to the '70s in the Arizona desert. It's Nana's Chicken Soup.

Greg Atkinson, Canlis executive chef, is the author of "In Season" (1997) and "The Northwest Essentials Cookbook" (1999) from Sasquatch Books.