For the month of February, each writer’s post will begin with the same line, which we’ve borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

All this happened, more or less.

I’ve forgotten how it started. Maybe one of us moaned about the cruel injustice of Monday mornings. Or we’d been struggling to plan a potluck, and every evening was off the table. Or someone was simply craving waffles.

What matters is that one fateful day during my junior year at Calvin, somewhere on the third floor of the Theta apartment building, Waffle Monday was born.

By happy accident, three of the rooms on the third floor (including mine) came pre-loaded with my friends. We roamed amongst each other’s apartments for procrastinatory evenings filled with Microsoft Kinect, Doctor Who, and baking adventures. One evening, we togged up in formalwear and suit-crashed a casual taco joint in downtown Grand Rapids. To wake ourselves up for another long night of paper-writing, we shed our shoes and danced across the nearby soccer field beneath the October moon.

And then there was Waffle Monday. However it came about, one Monday morning, before the sun had even contemplated rising, with the vines of sleep still twined around our limbs, and with 8 a.m. classes looming, we made waffles. For twelve people. Using a single waffle iron. In the second-floor lobby. And it was perfection.

The next week, it happened again. Then the next. Within a month, Waffle Monday was unquestionable tradition: we stumbled from our respective abodes and congregated in the lobby armed with plates and jugs of milk. The tables were quickly smeared with waffle batter and strewn with half-empty jars of peanut butter. Nutella, jam, honey, cinnamon, and chocolate chips were arrayed at our disposal. With much rubbing of eyes and clattering of forks, we whipped out waffle after waffle for whomever showed up looking hungry. Surprisingly few passersby took us up on the offer, which was probably a good thing in the end, or we would never have made it to class. We emptied and filled our waffle-generating workhorse until all were fed.

By senior year, my roommates and I had transitioned to an off-campus house just beyond KE. Waffle Monday morphed into biweekly pancake potlucks and evenings spent with glasses of decidedly off-campus wine and brownie sundaes.

Now, life has flung us far apart: we’re scattered across Seattle and Minneapolis, California and Detroit. And I’m in Ann Arbor, dreaming of waffles.

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