When we began hunkering down, my wife used it as an excuse to clean out the freezers, frig and pantry. (Yeah, she’s one of those people who said, “Now I have time to clean things,” and then cleaned, making the rest of us in the household (which is me and the three cats, so, really, we’re talking about me, because the cats don’t care) look bad. (Yeah, I’m over it, okay?) While doing that, she found some lemon and blueberries pancake mix.

We’d bought it a while ago at a locally famous mill, famous because it’s been there a long time and still does things the old fashioned way, and there’s nothing else like that in the area. Called Butte Creek Mill, it burned down in December, 2015. Because it was local and famous, we visited it and the pancake mix about six years before it burned down. So, it’s old stuff.

There wasn’t any date on it. My wife wanted to pitch it. “It can’t be good.” She opened it. We smelled it. Everyone knows that smelling is the second best scientific way to check for freshness. I let one of the cats smell it, but he just walked away with a bored tail shrug.

“Smells good to me,” I said. Then said, “Save it. I’ll make us pancakes on Easter morning. It’ll be fun.”

That brings us to today.

I rose, made breakfast and ate it (oatmeal with cranberries, walnuts, with granola on top), made coffee, and started writing. My wife came out a little later. “I thought you were making us pancakes this morning.”

This morning? Today? Oh, yeah, Easter. “Sorry, I was writing in my head and went to auto-pilot and forgot.”

She gave me a glare that made the sleeping cats wake up and leave (that’s why they left in my mind — they were sensing danger). I proposed to make the pancakes for brunch. “You don’t like eating this early anyway,” I said, like that made it all okay, because I was really thinking of her.

“Fine.” I could tell she wasn’t pleased.

Fast forward a few hours. I made the pancakes. We don’t have cow milk so used vanilla almond milk. One egg refused to leave its perch in the carton. Instead of taking one of the other thirteen eggs available as a sane person would do, I tried pulling it out and put my thumb through the shell.

Stupid egg.

Now I had an egg mess to clean up. I also wondered if it was a bad omen for the eggs, because these things must happen for a reason, and the reason could be as a warning, “Don’t eat the pancakes.”

(In hindsight, though, that one egg was the only one on that side. I’d wondered why it’d been left alone on that side. Now I suspect that my wife set me up. She can be diabolical.)

But the pancakes were made, and we haven’t died yet. They were delicious. Even though the blueberries seemed like pea stones in the batter, when they cooked up, they were moist, and looked and tasted just like real blueberries.

The package made about twenty-six pancakes about six inches in diameter (because that’s how I like them). We ate some and froze eighteen with wax paper between them. Now we have something to look forward to finding when we clean the freezer again.

It’ll probably be during the next pandemic.