The Food Fight

My mom walked in the kitchen door and we all froze. “What happened?! You better clean this up before dad gets home!”

This was probably one of my earliest food memories. I was 9, my sister 10, and my brother 7. My mom decided to make breakfast for dinner – one of the first times she decided to do this, so I guess you could say it was an experiment. We had a full-on spread – pancakes with syrup, butter, and powdered sugar, bowls of strawberries, grapes, bananas, toast, warm, fluffy English Muffins - everything you could imagine. The smell of homemade pancakes filled the house as my mom finished preparing everything. It was time to eat.

Once we all sat down at the table, my mom cam over. “Kids, I have to run to the IGA. I’ll be right back. Chelsea’s in charge.” My older sister, Chelsea, was always the responsible, motherly-type, and I knew there was going to be no funny business going on while my mom was gone. In a second, we heard the garage door open and close, and she was gone.

To be honest, I don’t know how it started. Or who started it, to be exact. I guess we hadn’t done anything bad or rebellious before, and that night we all just decided we were going to. Maybe it was the excitement from the variety of food on the table that night or the sugar from the syrup and powdered sugar. All of a sudden, it got really quiet, and before I knew it, someone flung a piece of fruit and it splattered against the wall. In less than a second, everyone was grabbing the syrup, the tin shaker can of powdered sugar – anything they would get their hands on – and was throwing it across the table. I grabbed the Aunt Jemima’s and tried to fight back against my brother, who was armed with the powdered sugar, but ended up missing my target over and over again until the walls were dripping with syrup and our cherry-wood hardwood floors had an extra glossy finish to them. After a good 10 minutes, we all stopped and looked at each other through a white, powdery puff that hung in the air. Hands and face covered in syrup, we all started laughing. We sat for another minute or so we heard the soft rumble of the garage door, and with a soft thump as it hit the ground, my stomach sunk. My mom walked in the door.

First, I want to make sure I point out that at our house, this type of thing never happened. My siblings and I – we just weren’t those type of kids. We were good, very well-behaved, and respectful. After reading this, I know you might be questioning this, but believe me, this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing for us.

Needless to say, my mom was shocked – but her second reaction was that my dad would be coming home, and we needed to clean up everything as fast as we could. She had us help out a little out, and then sent us upstairs to take showers while she cleaned up the rest. I don’t think we had breakfast for dinner for a long time after that.