Two Ways To Make A Doughnut

Cleaning the house for Pessach ends with the ritual of searching for chometz (bread). After weeks of cleaning, organizing, and preparing, my husband would take a feather, a candle, and a wooden spoon, and search in the darkness for any chometz that had been overlooked. Before he made the blessing, I would hide ten pieces of chometz, wrapped in little bags, together with the children. This was done so that the bracha would not be said in vain.

I took my cleaning seriously and I knew I was safe. With small children, once I cleaned, I guarded the areas: toys and drawers were sealed off, signs were put up, and spaces were locked to prevent the children from stashing leftover treats from Purim.

My job began anew after my husband said the bracha. He wouldn’t speak, and I would follow close behind him, re-tidying his trail, wondering why he thought he might find something in one of the kids’ pockets. I learned to write down where I hid the ten pieces because that became the greater threat—not my husband discovering unseen chometz, but my own failure to remember where I had placed it.

He knew me well—proud and assured that there was nothing else to be found.

As he entered each room with his candle, he would search slowly: the drawers, under the mattresses, behind the books. He was meticulous, and he had a long evening ahead of him, with the smell of chicken in the crockpot waiting. But he had an advantage—the children. It would turn into a game of “hot and cold”; the louder they giggled, the closer he knew he was to finding one of the ten hidden pieces.

On one of our first Pessachs, before his little helpers were on board, he triumphantly found a Cheerio under our bed. He called me to the scene of the crime and shined his flashlight underneath, as if to say, “Caught you,” with a twinkle in his eyes.

“Impossible,” I said. “Show me.”

He placed the small circle in my hand. I realized it was the tiny doughnut from a wooden curio I had dusted a month before.

This year, as I was cleaning and preparing for the holiday, I found a “Cheerio” under my boys’ bed. It was, in fact, a doughnut from a Playmobil set. When our children were young, we would buy doughnut holes from Amazing Donuts for their birthdays.

There are two ways to make a doughnut: you can roll out a snake and shape it into a circle, or you can make a ball, flatten it, and punch out the hole. Some things are made by shaping what is there. Others begin with what is missing.