By Faith Ellestad

It was 1970. We had been married for just a few months and had recently moved into our first real apartment.  It was on the second floor of a vintage two-flat on South Broom Street. The smell of old wood, and previous mellowed out residents permeated the place.  A locked door in our living room wall divided the upper flat into two small apartments, which shared a bathroom. That door was like a megaphone, piping in every wheeze and snort from the chronically hacking, long-time resident next door.  Creaky planked floors and no insulation allowed us to share every sound from the apartment below, including, but not limited to, the first floor tenant’s son playing his eight-track tape of Arthur Conley shouting “Do you like good music” without fail every morning at 7:00.  (Yes, we did, but that was not it.) Of course, it never occurred to us that the buildings’ other occupants likely experienced exactly the same annoyances from us.

In any case, we loved our place, the plate rail around the perimeter of the living room, our “Kiss a toad tonight” poster on the wall, and the grotto we had fashioned from some cement blocks, a couple of ceramic toads we had gotten as wedding gifts, and several colorful vigil lights from who knows where.  We reveled in our place and our freedom.

I was student teaching at the time while my husband, who was finishing up his degree, worked nights stocking shelves at. supermarket. Obviously, our schedules did not sync very well.  He was generally just rolling out of bed when I got back from school, and I was usually asleep when he got home from his job. I vividly remember one late evening, when, shortly after I had retired for the night, he called from work, an unusual and potentially alarming occurrence.

 “Hey, we‘re done early and the guys are really hungry.  Could you make us something to eat?” 

“Oh sure, bring them over”, I said confidently, and leapt out of bed, clueless as to what I could possibly feed them. One problem was I could barely cook at all, and another was that we had no money and not much food at that particular moment. 

As I threw on some clothes, my brain clicked into overdrive. Suddenly, I remembered Aunt GeeGee’s vintage waffle iron tucked away in our closet. GeeGee and her husband, Fuzzy, were my husband’s great-aunt and uncle who lived in town and had invited us over for lunch a few weeks after our wedding. Their beautiful old Victorian house had a basement filled with decades’ worth of their retired belongings. Uncle Fuzzy had showed us around, and generously encouraged us to take anything we thought might be useful.  Wandering through the clutter, we had spied the dusty old chrome waffle iron peeking out of a rickety wicker planter. For waffle enthusiasts like ourselves, it was just the thing.  We had received three electric frying pans in various seventies colors as wedding presents, but nothing as useful as a waffle maker, so we carted it home, along with the planter, in our little yellow Volkswagen.

What a lucky choice it turned out to be, that 40-year-old waffle iron with the frayed, detachable cord and unbelievably heavy metal plates that reversed so you could make grilled cheese, if you knew how, which I didn’t. Plus, we were devoid of cheese But we did have Bisquick Baking Mix and miraculously, a jug of real maple syrup, a wedding gift from a friend of my parents, who tapped his own maple trees. I read the recipe on the Bisquick box and convinced myself we could have waffles.  At least I hoped we could.  This would be my first test of good wife-ness, since I didn’t know my spouse’s friends, and desperately didn’t want to embarrass him.  Taking a deep cleansing breath, I inserted the plug, and fortunately, did not blow a fuse.

I felt vibrations of many heavy footsteps clambering up the creaky wooden stairs just about the time the waffle iron finished preheating.  Smells of hot old metal and grease filled the apartment, the result of an overly generous amount of oil I had dumped onto the red-hot waffle grids. Entering unknown culinary territory, I poured whopping ladlesful of batter into the iron, closed the lid, and waited for crisp, golden waffles to form. They did not.  Instead, the batter, after absorbing all the extra grease, began to smoke and burn as it bubbled out of the grids and flowed down the sides of the iron, forming gloppy tan puddles on the counter below. So gross. And inedible.  Dismayed, but fiercely determined to succeed, I quickly scraped out the scorched yet glutinous blobs, blotted up the excess oil, and began again with greatly reduced portions of batter. Success!  The second batch was fabulous and consumed in about a minute. Waffles for five, I discovered, is not a quick meal.  I cooked constantly for over an hour, basking proudly in the sight of four sweaty, starving guys enthusiastically devouring my restaurant-worthy (I felt), waffles drowned in gourmet maple syrup, served elegantly on the new wedding dishes with the new wedding silverware.

The waffle-fest ended just as dawn broke and my new fan club left, declaring their intentions to return for another waffle party very soon. My husband looked so pleased with our impromptu gathering that I felt I had probably achieved the pinnacle of my married life. I cooked. I coped; I entertained!

Fast forward 54 years.  The only dishes left from our wedding set are one serving platter and a Gorilla-glued butter dish.  Most of the wedding stainless has had at least a couple of spins through the garbage disposal, and we have a new waffle iron that we can’t use because its electronic doneness beep upsets the cats.  We get our syrup at Woodman’s now.  But that’s ok. I don’t think I could ever recreate the waffles we had that night on Broom Street. And I wouldn’t want to. Probably. Maybe I would, though.  I’m not sure.

© 2025 Faith Ellestad

Faith has been writing to amuse her family since she was old enough to print letters to her grandparents.  Now retired, she has taken the opportunity to sort through family memorabilia, discovering a wellspring of tales begging to be told, which she hopes to expand upon in written form (where appropriate, of course!).   She and her husband live in Madison, Wisconsin. They are the parents of two great sons and a loving daughter-in-law, and recently expanded their family to include Thistle and Bramble, two irrepressible young felines.