My grandmother's blue Le Creuset pot

My grandmother's blue Le Creuset pot is sitting in the drawer under the stovetop, along with the rest of my pots.

I never use it. I don't touch it. Sometimes I think about moving it my office and putting it up on a bookshelf, just so that I can look at it. For some reason, I can't put it away.

Its enamel is peeling, the iron is rusted over, and it is likely unsafe to cook in. It's too small, the perfect size for a serving of six for soup, not enough for many more I cook for these days.

The world I was born into was so small. I was raised near my mother's family, which consisted of my parents, my grandparents, Oma and Opa, Holocaust survivors from Germany and Austria who came to remake their lives in New York. My beloved aunt, who loves me like her own child, my first playmate, who used to climb into the playpen with me and I still speak to her every day. My great-grandmother, a small Polish woman with white hair and a thick accent who survived the loss of her husband at a young age and a lifetime without him.

Just them and me.

A family of survivors who lost most of their family. 70 to Auschwitz alone.

As the oldest, I remember the quiet of the hours we spent together, my birth a statement that our people persist, survive, rebuild.

In time, my parents gave me my sister and brothers. My aunt gave me my uncle and cousins. And now we are a larger clan filled with noise and love, teens and babies, weddings and the ups and downs of life.

In my earliest days, I would walk into my Oma's house, and it smelled like soup. I followed my nose to the kitchen, and there was that little blue pot, enough soup to nourish our small little family.

We would sit around the dining room, with china and crystal, a phone book under my bottom so I could reach the table, and that first hit of dill would hit my tongue. The salt from her soup cubes. The tenderness of the vegetables. The density of the knerdlach.

I won't lie when I tell you that there is no taste that has ever brought me more comfort than that first bite.

Even now, I'll make soup mostly because I miss my grandparents, and the love I felt in their house, and the taste of being safe and happy.

Because now I'm almost 40, and I live in a place that erupts in war all the time.

As we speak, we're watching the news and waiting for another cycle to begin with Iran all over again.

Right now, all I want is soup. Doesn't matter that it's the middle of the summer.

I have a big red Le Cruset pot that's my own. I fill it with my grandmother's soup multiple times a week.

I can't go back to her little kitchen.

But sometimes, I can bring it back to me.