One of the earliest memories I have begins when I am three. I am sitting at the shiny mahogany desk in our living room at 7 Church Place, in Bellows Falls, Vermont. My mother used to call the desk, “the secretary.” At that time, being so young, I did not know the meaning of that word. Nevertheless, I intuited that it was a place where I could sit in peace, scribbling the stories I loved to create. How I knew that it was a writing place at a time when I had not even learned to print, is for me a kind of proof that we carry past-life tendencies with us. No one in my family ever wrote anything at the secretary at all. It was just a piece of furniture where things, rarely used, were stored. But it was my sacred place. I was there that like a little yogini, I could dissociate from my body, and become one with the words I chose for my stories. For me, In the beginning was the Word—really!
My mother and my father and a black, bob-tailed cat named Midnight and I lived upstairs over my born-in-Poland grandmother. She was my mother’s mother and I called her Babcha. Her ground-floor apartment in the dark brown duplex which she owned, and according to her vast oral repertoire of stories, she had purchased at 50 cents per week, was actually my second favorite place to be; for it was spiritual in a different sense. It renewed me and gently eased me back into the world of samsara. You see, one part of my life was Heaven, another part was Hell. One part of my life took place beyond my mind; another part was glued to it.
Our house, even though Babcha owned it, belonged to all of us. She constantly reminded us of this. And I personally felt that I belonged to and was a part of every room and closet and of every under-the-eaves crawl space in the attic. From as early as I can remember, I have felt connected to the energy around me. In retrospect, I learned much more by osmosis than I did from books, perhaps.
Church Place had no churches on it, but it was a relatively serene neighborhood considering it was full of poor, working-class, second-generation families, like ours, with heaps of kids and dogs. I, on the other hand, was an only child. The lot our house was situated on was replete with trees and bushes which my recently widowed Babcha tended by herself—not that she ever got much help in that department from her husband, a sensitive and violin-playing man who wound up working at a paper mill just to be able to live in a free country and earn a decent wage. He might have been a half-starved musician playing in a Warsaw orchestra. Instead he put away the violin, worked as many shifts as he could to support his family of two sons and a daughter. Then he just lay down and died of alcoholism that no one has ever really admitted. After the burial few words were spoken about Papa. I remember his after-shave colognes and his hearty laughter. Once he took me to the chicken sheds up on Hyde Hill and told me he would chop my head off and put me in an oven and roast me, just like the chickens that I saw being butchered there. I wet my pants in terror and all his friends laughed like crazy. The violin he had brought from Poland haunted our Church Place attic for decades—until one day it just disappeared like dust in the rain.
From Babcha’s gardens came the fruits and vegetables we ate fresh in season and out of thick bluish preserve jars in winter. We lived across the street from a vacant lot surrounded by mostly triplexes and a once-stately Victorian mansion that had been partitioned off into apartments.
At home, I loved roaming the basement where the huge monster furnace was, where the root cellar full of potatoes, carrots and beets hulked. It looked like a gigantic sand box filled with smoke-scented earth. There the root vegetables were buried, as if to trick them into believing they were still in the garden. In fall and winter, it was my delightful job to dig them up on Babcha’s command, which was usually once a day just before supper. Wooden slatted pickle jars as tall as toddlers were full of dills and sauerkraut. The sweet and sours lined the canned-goods shelves in recycled baby-food jars.
My personal kingdom began in the basement and climbed all the way up into the attic. What’s more, I could come and go as I pleased throughout the house. In Babcha’s rooms, I ate candy from her crystal bowl set on the round dining room table; I rummaged into her pantry to look for the donut-like Polish confections known as krushtyki which she kept hidden there. I always found the hiding place, though, as Babcha probably intended, and I gorged on the powdered sugar treats. Her ice-box was full of tempting snacks as well.
In her house I could lie down on the sofa and look at her large array of healthy houseplants anytime I wanted. Velvet, raspberry-colored gloxinia, African violets in shades of pink and white, double and single petalled as well. There were coral geraniums, red poinsettias, and magenta cyclamen that bloomed then withered then bloomed again. I was fascinated by them and by the tulips that Babcha forced into flower to brighten our home during the darkest blizzard days of February and March. I literally watched the ivy grow, the fern fronds reach for the light, and the sansiveria spike tall and lethal looking, like emerald swords. And the immense jade plant fascinated me, especially since it was said to bloom only once every nine years. I had not yet lived long enough to see this happen. But I believed it would. How could I know then that when I reached nine, many of the buds within me, my potential flowers, my most delicious fruits would be ripped out of me, hurled onto the ground and eaten by wild pigs? I couldn’t know. And I’m glad.
Babcha was my first Guru, really. And while she was out working as a laundress, a housekeeper and a maid, and my mother was out working as well and I was looking after my sick father, I had these wonderful contemplative times all alone in Babcha’s living room— which also functioned as a dining room when special guests visited. Naturally, I learned to love plants and the cycles of the seasons just by staying with a grandmother who kept something in bloom all around the outside of the house, and on the inside too. The plants on the stands she had placed under the three windows that formed a bay and looked out at the back yard mesmerized me. My horticultural studies began right then and there and ended up at Horticultural Hall in Boston just before my entire world went numb.
So, yes, there was the cool-damp promise of the basement and its peculiar scent that triggered a bit of terror in me. The smudgy smell of the root cellar combined with the fumes the coal-burning furnace produced a deju-vu experience in me. But it was the experience of a blind person, for I could never “see” anything. The aroma, though, was clearly from way back in time. Was it the torching of the teepees with our children still inside? I later wondered, or the burning bodies at Varanasi, maybe. Even the Avatar Guru I came to see in India, and whose ashram I have lived near for many years, has never answered my queries. “Trust my uncertainty,” He said in one of His discourses. It’s hard for me to trust much nowadays. It was impossible then.
And always there were chores up the stairs from Babcha’s. Upstairs is where I spent most of my time. It was upstairs that I first noticed that sometimes my parents and Midnight, who was one year older than me, were also enveloped in the same cellar scent that I came to associate with episodes of dread. Decades later I would understand why.
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