We continue to feed each other — from a distance

We were young and childless, we were broke and hungry. We all owned multiple Moosewood cookbooks. It was my best friend’s brainchild: a weekly meal that would move from house to house, bringing the eight of us together to commune, consume, and dream up ways to change the world.

Here’s how it worked: The hosts would cook and clean up; the others would come at 7 and leave at 8:30 p.m. We circulated a list of food quirks: Ilene hates tempeh, Hannah can’t abide coconut, and I’m a lactose-intolerant pescatarian.

Mount Airy Monday Night Dinner Collective was born.

For several years, the conversation ranged wide and rich: politics, education, literature, faith. We deconstructed family dynamics: Your mother said what? We discussed the movies we’d seen, the articles we’d read, the anxieties that kept us awake at night.

One by one, we finished graduate school — a rabbi, a lawyer, a social worker. Two of the lesbian couples got married, even before it was legal. We launched our professional lives. I wrote a book. We clinked glasses for each milestone: L’chaim. To life.

Then the kids came – infants we passed from arm to arm while forking up spinach lasagna with the other hand. Dinner collective became “soup group,” a snappier name to match our distracted attention spans, an earlier time (6-7:30 p.m.) to accommodate kids’ bedtimes.

For a long stretch, soup group got noisier and more contentious. It was hard to finish a sentence. Nearly every meal ended with someone — not necessarily a child — in tears.

We weren’t only eating together. We were becoming adults, digging into careers, trying to raise our families in a kind of loose collective, a chosen family. We struggled to reach consensus: One cookie or two? Could a child bring a favorite toy to soup group, then forbid the other kids to touch it? Were they allowed to get naked? (Nope, but they could strip down to underwear for dress-up.)

The crowd kept swelling; we added extensions to the dining room table, dragged in the piano bench for extra seating. Now we are 15 – eight adults and seven kids, a keen, inquisitive, quirky brood ranging in age from 19 (my daughter) to 3.

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At some point, a weeknight dinner for more than a dozen became unwieldy, so we designed a new system: three weeks of each month we meet in pairs with one household cooking and preparing half the food to go, and once a month (usually for a birthday or holiday) we gather en masse.

On those occasions, whether the person of honor is turning 4 or 54, we insist that they skip around the room while we sing. Then we ask birthday questions: What’s something you’re proud of from the last year? What’s something you were afraid of, but did anyway? What are your goals for the coming 12 months?

On Rosh Hashana, we dip local apples in honey harvested from Ilene’s bees. In June, we crunch on lettuce from Hannah’s garden; by August, we’re eating pesto from ours. On Poem in Your Pocket Day (this year, it’s April 23), I tuck a poem, selected with that person in mind, under each plate. We still untangle family dynamics, though the tables have flipped: Your kid said what?

The years spun us, changed us: bat mitzvahs, tenure, graduations. The deaths of parents. One bout with cancer. One shattered kneecap. Max became a prodigy on violin; River, at 3, read her birthday cards aloud. Sasha packed and left for Barnard; Mic planned for a gap year after high school.

And then, coronavirus put a frightening hitch in our routine, in all routines. For our first COVID-19 soup group — we were on the schedule to cook, but it didn’t feel prudent to gather — Elissa and I made a huge kettle of split pea soup to ladle out, on our porch, into the other families’ saucepans.

I sliced a steaming round of Irish soda bread and bundled the wedges in foil. We portioned salad, bright with beet batons and carrots, into plastic tubs. Sasha made a batch of perfect chocolate chip cookies. I folded a poem into each bag.

We checked in from the CDC-advised 6-foot margin of safety: How are you holding up? Read anything hopeful today? Hey, give my love to the rest of the family. And then we three sat down for a quieter-than-usual dinner.

It wasn’t until the following morning that I clocked the date, did the math: Soup group just turned 25. Fifty-two weeks a year for a quarter-century: that’s more than 1,200 meals. One more party we’ll need to postpone.

So many of our human rituals are on hiatus for a while. We can’t clink cups, trade bites or even sit at the same dining room table. But we can still feed one another. We can share what we have, handing our bounty over the fence, across the porch, through the front door.

This is how we will survive coronavirus, and the crisis after that, and the ones we can’t even imagine. Friend to friend. Hand – washed for 20 seconds, with soap, of course – to mouth.