First Visit, by Pamela Cravez

There is a baby in my kitchen sink, round-faced with serious blue eyes, she sits in an inch of water as her mother lathers her hair into a soapy spike on top of her head. Her father is watching. He is also watching his phone for messages from work. It is 9 in the morning in Alaska, four hours later in Connecticut where this baby lives with myson and daughter-in-law.

This is their first trip back to Alaska with my first grandchild.

It is still dark outside, the sun has yet to come up this winter morning. But my kitchen is bright. There are tomatoes and cucumbers spilling over the counter for an Israeli salad. Bowls of homemade

hummus and tahini are in the fridge along with spicy green zhoug and red harissa. Ever since a friend introduced me to Yotom Ottolenghi’s cookbook, “Jerusalem,” I’ve been obsessed with the Middle Eastern flavors, feeling a cultural connection though these are not the foods I ate as a child, nor the foods I made for my two boys while they grew up in

Anchorage.

To mark my granddaughter’s first visit, I am making Ottolenghi’s recipe for babka. I started the recipe last night, making the dough in a mixer my own grandmother gave me when I got married forty years ago. I took the dough out of the refrigerator this morning and followed the directions on a recipe that spread over four pages — pulling and pressing the dough into a rectangle, painting it with melted chocolate, rolling it into a cylinder, slashing it through the top into two strands then twisting them together and shaping it all into a loaf.

I’d never made a babka before.

Until now, it’s just been a word that makes us laugh, like schnitzengruben and Scharzwalder Kirschtorte, along with phrases like, “More beans, Mr. Taggert?” “What hump?” “Taffeta darling.” Words from hours and hours of watching episodes of Seinfeld and Mel Brooks’ movies. How we surrounded our children with the feeling of being part

of a larger Jewish community.

My sandy-haired son picks up leftover pieces of chocolate on the counter and eats them as I put the babka into the oven. When I turn around my daughter-in-law hands me my granddaughter, diapered and wrapped in a towel. The baby smells of soap, her hair still damp, her lacy blue eyes fixed on me. Though she can barely keep them open. I take her to a chair in the living room and sit. My son sits in the chair opposite me and I feel the generations transform. I am no longer just a mother, but a grandmother. My son is a father.

I have seen this once before, in the days after Thanksgiving 32 years earlier, when I handed a small baby wrapped in a cotton blue and pink striped hoody to my mother. She and my father had traveled from their home in Miami to Anchorage in the dark of December to meet their first grandchild.

My father, an artist, went to the store and bought tubes of paint. There was a sense of joy and purpose as he painted a family of playful orangutans on the walls of his grandson’s bedroom, a mother and father, their limbs loose, bodies relaxed, a baby swinging on a vine between them.

I think of this, as the smell of bread and chocolate is all around. I wonder if my cooking frenzy is like my father’s week of painting. A release of energy brought on by a new life. We grandparents have been down this road, rewarding and unknown. We cannot help but have a sense of awe as we watch it begin again. I pull the babka from the oven. It is still sticky and hot when I put slices on a plate for us to eat.

A day later, my granddaughter and her parents will leave Alaska. I will feel the rush of energy, the need to do things that are special, fall away.

Still, the fact of this new person in the world growing, changing each day, will take hold of me. Make me hunger to see beyond this first winter visit; to see what happens next. Though she will appear to be changing quickly, time for me is moving much more swiftly.