I had my first baby in the middle of fall, the same week the tree outside our front window burned bright orange and pumpkins appeared on every doorstep in my neighborhood. I brought my brand-new daughter home and spent those first weeks of motherhood bouncing and feeding a newborn while the leaves dropped outside my window until the ground was submerged in golden embers. Those were weeks of transition, for the weather and for me, and what got me through that incredibly new, sometimes confusing time was soup. Within hours of my daughter’s birth, my younger sister showed up at the hospital to meet her. My husband and I ate her turkey bean soup hungrily, right out of the Tupperware container on the sterile hospital couches. While she held her new niece, I scraped the edges of the container with my plastic spoon, feeling like she had brought me much …