When the rain drizzles cold and the wind shivers damp and the chill settles into your bones, don’t you go poking around the cupboard for canned tuna fish or rambling through the refrigerator for pork chops or scrounging in the freezer for skinless, boneless, low-fat chicken breasts.

Some days are soup days. Just go with the flow.

It’s a law of man and nature: when the temperature falls below 25 degrees, thou shalt eat soup. Cook up a big pot.

No, ma’am, that dry yellow powder in an aluminum pouch and/or paper envelope in a cardboard box does not qualify as soup. Neither does that congealed-pink starchy mass inside a red and white can.

On soup days we must return to our roots, the kitchen. That means home-made soup made with no preservatives, no additives — and so many chunks you can’t say “mm-mmm good” with your mouth full.

Some folks, I know, like hunky ham and bean or zesty chicken gumbo as a cold weather soup, but my soup of choice is vegetable — not vegetarian vegetable, but vegetable cooked with plenty of meat. Some folks, I know, use ham or beef bones to make vegetable soup, but I use hamburger meat like my momma taught me.

Some folks, I know, eat vegetable soup with soda crackers, but my family would just as soon eat a Styrofoam cup and call it a doughnut. Soup without cornbread is a like a church-supper chicken casserole without mushroom soup. Of course, it can be done—but decent people ought be ashamed to think of it.

Those of us who are grandmother-trained soup-makers start from scratch, of course. We retrieve from the pantry that rarely-used stock pot into which 12-year-old children have crawled during games of hide-and-seek. (Martha Stewart might say: “It would be a good thing to rinse out the pot before adding water.”)

With the lid on the pot, we simmer a ham or beef bone (or hamburger meat) through Family Court and Divorce Court, People’s Court and Judge Judy’s Court, Judge Joe Brown’s Court and Judge Judy’s Husband’s Court — until at last, the meat is so tender it would be baby food with one tap of a gavel.

All the while the meat is simmering, we grandmother-trained soup-makers are slicing and dicing, chopping and dropping veggies into the pot: okra and potatoes, green beans and English peas, carrots and celery, Lima beans and corn, cabbage and onions. All through the evening, we are tasting and seasoning — and stirring every few minutes to keep the soup from sticking to anything but the ribs.

By now it should be self-evident: real soup, like real love, takes time. Why, my grandmother started preparing her mid-winter soup in mid-summer. She put up “soup mixture” from her garden in steaming jars by the dozen, and there’s nothing like home-grown tomatoes in soup.

Alas, I’m a big-city girl now. I long ago made peace with canned tomatoes, but I still add a healthy dose of sugar. That’s a grandmother secret of good soup, you know: cut the acid with a spoonful of sweet. Another grandmother secret? Some vegetables, you can make do without — but not the cabbage. Singing over the pot seems to add a nice flavor, too. After all, soup in cold weather is more about love than nutrition, anyway.

Yes, when a soup day is decreed by cold weather, there’s nothing like a steaming bowl of vegetable soup to warm your heart — and blister your tongue, if you’re not careful.

But not every soup day is decreed by cold weather.

Soup days can be decreed by pesky viruses, too.

When your nose drizzles damp and your stuffy head aches and the coughing and the sneezing rattle your bones, don’t just go poking around in the medicine cabinet for industrial strength antihistamines and rambling through the vitamin bottles in search of mega-potent C and scrounging in the basement for the humidifier you haven’t used since your teenagers were babies.

Some days are soup days. Just go with the flow.

When you are afflicted with a cold or flu or fever of unknown origin, it’s a natural law: let someone else cook up a big pot of soup for you — chicken, of course.

Just make sure the recipe for that chicken-and-rice soup or chicken-and-homemade-noodle soup or chicken-broth-with-celery soup has been handed down … from someone’s grandmother. After all, really good soup — like most good children — has known a grandmother’s touch.

As everybody who has ever sat at a grandmother’s table knows: Some days are soup days. Let’s just go with the flow in the cold days ahead and through the colds they may bring.

Aaa-aaa-achoo!