SoRo Stone Soup

You may remember the children’s story...

Two soldiers walk into town empty-handed and in desperate need of a good dinner. The stingy villagers won’t invite them in to dine, but when the soldiers start cooking up a batch of Stone Soup, the villagers get curious and toss in a carrot here, a potato there, just to see what happens. Yadda, yadda, yadda...

In no time at all, the whole village settles in to enjoy a feast—and a community—cooked up seemingly out of nothing.

On a brilliant Thursday each September, just after the Tunbridge World’s Fair ends, that scene plays itself out again on the town green in tiny South Royalton, Vermont. And yesterday was no exception, despite the town’s recent struggles recuperating from Tropical Storm Irene.

First, two men roll up with an old cast iron cauldron large enough to parboil a whole pig. They set up a table and a tent, they bring out knives and a stack of wood and get the fire started.

Over the course of the day, the rest seems to simply materialize.

First neighbors arrive with crates of vegetables: leeks and garlic, tomatoes and eggplant, corn and carrots and zucchini the size of baseball bats. Then come the choppers, a mix of annual volunteers and people who just happen by and have some time on their hands. They stand side by side at cutting boards, turning potatoes into piles of diced red and purple cubes, rotating in and out to lug water or leave for work or school, pausing to bask in the late summer sun or to jump into the impromptu bluegrass jam session that forms around the fire.

Come early afternoon, the farmers’ market starts. Vendors pull up in red pickups and set up tables with jars of pickles and jams, piles of pumpkins, baskets full of bread and coolers of local meat and eggs. Customers trickle back and forth between the market and the steaming soup pot.

More workers arrive, taking turns with the endless slicing and dicing, the setting up of tables and chairs, adding wood to the fire, taking a turn stirring the broth with a paddle that might have been liberated from the basement of a frat house.

Just before the late afternoon sun sinks down behind the mountains, the soup is done.

Boards are piled high with fresh-baked bread that came from somewhere nearby. Cups are filled to the brim from jugs of local cider that someone dropped off earlier. Tables and chairs and blankets are scattered across the green, but many don’t bother and just sit on the grass. Bowls are stacked and waiting to be ladled with the first drops of a soup that is different every year, and just as delicious every time.

And then they come: law students, high school students, soccer moms, select board members, retired road workers, farmers, doctors and tourists who just happened off the highway.

They sit at tables together under the wide wingspan of oaks and maples. They eat soup and talk shop. They catch up with friends they haven’t seen in the busy summer months, and they meet neighbors they’ve never had the occasion to meet.

It’s tempting to say there is community where just hours before there was none, but that isn’t true.

You couldn’t set up a soup pot on just any town green and expect this to happen. South Royalton—and the White River Valley beyond—is a place where community is always bubbling up under the surface and often spilling out into the streets.

Just weeks (or perhaps hours) ago, some of these same people and hundreds more were shoveling mud out of each other’s cellars in the aftermath of Irene. They were carting supplies by horseback and bike into isolated towns and checking on neighbors still stranded up winding mountain roads.

And this to me seems the truest measure of community. Those of us lucky enough to live in these little towns may not visit everyday, we may not know each other by name or even by sight, and we may have little in common.

But we have the capacity to come together when it counts, whether it’s to save a house from floating down the river, or to clean up a flooded-out cow barn, to chop a pile of vegetables to feed the village, or just to pause to celebrate the beauty of a perfect day in early fall.