only bought them because she didn’t want to be embarrassed by her daughter dressed in shabby school clothes and dirty loafers at a fancy wedding. The bad thing was that my feet and my body were growing too fast, and soon the beautiful Mary Jane shoes and my princess dress would be too small.
Every school day, my mother stood like a warden at the bottom of the stairs, ready to inspect me. I’d descend, halt in front of her before rotating around like a robot. I don’t remember ever being sent back upstairs to change—there was nothing in my closet she hadn’t chosen. What I never forgot was the disgusting odors of Mother’s soiled housedress.
Post inspection, she ordered me to the kitchen and planted her overflowing bottom on a high-back chair. I squirmed on a small wooden stool in front of her. “No move nothing!” Her hand waved a pig bristle brush. Unlike the bobbed style copied by all the “in girls” at school, my auburn hair had never been cut. When loose, it fell below my waist.
My sweaty, pudgy fingers gripped the edge of the stool. If we had fifteen minutes, Mother might do “donuts”—two coils of braids tightly wound into circles above my ears, anchored by hairpins stabbing into my scalp. If time was tight, she either twisted my thick hair into one fat braid tapering into a rubber-banded stump, its wayward ends fanning out. Or she yanked my hair into two ruler-straight braids measuring from my ears to below my shoulders.
In school, I tried to act as if being different and looking different didn’t matter to me. But that was a cover up, because my classmates’ stares and taunts shaped a daily gauntlet I had to pass though.
“Mamusia, I hate my old-fashioned clothes and hair—they make me look like an immigrant!”
Mother’s face turned red like a boiling beet. Her pale blue eyes darkened, and she began to scream in Polish (I’m embarrassed to translate). Furious, Mother stomped out of the kitchen. I didn’t move from the stool, even though I knew what was coming. Behind her bedroom door, The Warden grabbed the hanging leather belt, wrapped the buckle end around her hand, and marched back to teach me a lesson that I hadn’t learned the last time.
Her hands never touched me. Instead, she lashed the belt wildly at my bottom and my back where bruises wouldn’t show. Her outbursts were predictable. It was impossible to know what would bring them on. And that was what frightened me the most about my mother.
The big kitchen clock got The Warden’s attention. “Now time go to school!”
Passing the hall mirror next to the front door, I couldn’t stand looking at myself. I fumbled with the heavy lock, sighed deeply, and began the thirty-minute walk to school. My bottom still smarting from the morning’s punishment, I consoled myself with the memory of gentle Brutus and wished he were still alive and by my side.
Mother’s influence over me would last a lifetime. As a wife and a mother, I would ask myself again and again: How had I allowed Mother to insidiously shape my expectations, weaken my self-confidence, and expose my vulnerabilities? Why couldn’t I see her as a fractured role model and trust that I deserved unconditional love? Her character, formed by adversity, would weave itself deep into my psyche. Years later, I would finally be able to reconcile that despite the angst, fear, and rebellion that she had provoked in me, she’d also inspired my fortitude, courage, and resilience.
Dad and the Farm
Juzo, aka “Joseph,” Sosinski, resembled a bald-headed Ike Eisenhower in khaki casuals, as he drove the 1950s Packard sedan with silent intensity. Beside him in the passenger seat, I stretched up my eight-year-old body and craned my head left and right, like a vigilant bird that couldn’t risk missing a critical opportunity. Dad said our journey was to check on things at the farm. But we both knew the real purpose was to escape from Mother who, for mysterious reasons, avoided going to the farm.
Carefree times were rare, and I savored them. For me, the farm was a place of refuge and wonderment. For Dad, the farm offered freedom—to eat simple meals, to enjoy nature, and to withdraw into silence. I felt my presence at the farm was almost irrelevant to him.
Old Glendale Farm was located in the township of Hebron, some eighteen miles from downtown Hartford. During my childhood, the farm was prime rural property—300 acres of fertile pastures, rambling hills, meandering streams, and secret caves. Driving there took us through Connecticut tobacco country, where miles of low-rising, voluminous canopies flapped ever so slightly in the breeze, not tall enough to be tents, yet appearing endless and ominous to a little girl with a big imagination. “Tatush, what goes on under those long white sheets?” I asked.
He tightened his grip on the polished wood of the steering wheel. “Don’t ask foolish questions.” Dad didn’t want his reverie disturbed. I retreated to my fantasies: Under the white-covered fields, hordes of men with dark skin labored—bent and sweating. They sorted whatever grew in those fields into massive bundles.
Decades later, still curious about those mysterious canopies, I did some research. During the 1940s and early 1950s our route to Old Glendale Farm took us through “shade tobacco” country. The white canopies of my childhood fantasies were actually meant to increase the humidity around the crop of tobacco designated for manufacture of high-end cigars.
In the 1950s, smokers received no dire health warnings. Advertising genius of that era instead created a mystique about smoking. Adults puffed away guilt free. Gutsy kids hid in the bushes, coughing and smoking like they were grownups. Glamorous Hollywood stars like Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, and James Dean smoked to look sexy, savvy, and virile. Magazines and billboards promoted The Marlboro Man as rugged and handsome. Smoke swirling around his Stetson, he gazed out over America’s big, bold country, and passersby were hooked. For almost a century, this coveted harvest was Connecticut’s number one agricultural export.
Dad slowed the mighty Packard as we approached the rural village of Hebron and passed a cluster of stone houses, momentary interruptions to the surrounding farmland. In those years Hebron had no enticing farm stalls with fresh produce for sale, no country store serving hand-churned ice cream—what it did have was lots and lots of stone. Centuries before, Yankee ancestors had tilled up more stones than soil and used them to build boundary fences so solid they would last hundreds of years.
Soon the road narrowed into a single country lane, where distance between the roadside mailboxes suggested the size of a property. Anyone wandering by would think Old Glendale Farm was modest, if they judged it by the ordinary stone farmhouse. The two-story structure was built on a slight rise set back about fifty feet from the road. The Packard bumped onto the rocky driveway alongside the house. The farmhouse’s façade seemed to have been crafted by quilters working in fieldstones. A quirky wood balcony, too small for a human occupant, jutted over the front door. I never could come up with a practical purpose for it. Across the front yard, wildflowers danced on uncut grass, no sign of a human gardener working a lawn mower. The ramshackle toolshed behind the house had no visitors. On the opposite side of the road, the derelict gray barn loomed. Who else, besides me, could hear the ghostly mooing and jostling of past dairy cows waiting for farm hands to milk them?
Unable to contain my excitement, I leaped out of my seat as soon as the motor stopped and scrambled up the stone steps to the concrete veranda that wrapped around the house. From all sides, the views were glorious. I breathed in the fragrance of the land—a heady mix of field pollen, rotting apples fallen from the trees, and seedlings sprouting in the vegetable garden. Dad planted seeds on impulse. Given the randomness of our visits to the farm, we never knew what had survived for us to eat. Eyes squeezed shut, I plopped down on the cement and began my counting game: “One, two, three, four, how many things do I remember—”
“Danusia,” Dad called. “Come help.” He stood by the Packard with all its doors wide open. Mother wouldn’t
