MISQUAH — The Daybreak Café’s Mother’s Day brunch proceeded to a successful if strenuous conclusion Sunday, owner Pat Reinholt reported, with no injuries, a full house from open to past one, and the total and simultaneous collapse of both of the café’s waffle irons within twenty minutes of each other during the rush.

The irons, described by Reinholt as “older than some of the mothers we were feeding,” gave out under a demand the café sees exactly once a year and is never quite prepared for. “You can’t staff for Mother’s Day,” Reinholt said. “It’s the one morning everybody in three townships decides at the same time that Mom shouldn’t cook. We made it, but we made it the hard way, and the second iron went down right when we thought we’d turned the corner.”

The morning’s only genuine dispute concerned the chokecherry syrup, a small batch of which the café puts out each spring and which runs out, reliably, before everyone who wants it gets it. “There was a discussion,” Reinholt allowed, “between two parties who both felt they had a claim on the last of the chokecherry. It was resolved. I won’t say how. I’ll say it involved the kitchen’s private reserve and a promise of secrecy I am now breaking.”

By early afternoon the rush had passed, the survivors had been fed, and one waffle iron had been coaxed back to life with what Reinholt called “a screwdriver and a kind word.” The other has been set aside for repair or, more likely, for the shelf in the back where the café’s retired equipment waits, he said, “for a decision I keep not making.”