My fiancée, Meredith, and I were sitting crossed-legged on cushions around a low wooden table with the tea ceremonialist and two other young women. Now and then, a gray cat jumped onto our laps.

The tea ceremonialist took a black pot from an electric heater and poured the liquid into our ceramic mugs. We contemplated the earthy flecks at the bottom. We sipped loudly.

“Everything is perfect,” the tea ceremonialist said in a soothing voice.

I closed my eyes. For a moment, she seemed correct.

But just overhead in this dining room — part of a secluded wooden house in the mountains northwest of Boulder, Colo. — was a ceiling fan.

It was the very same ceiling fan that my friend Larry had used to play a prank on me during a teenage sleepover: While I was taking a shower, he emptied the contents of my wallet; and then, while leaning out of an opening from a third-story room, he laid them on the fan blades. When I got out of the bathroom, Larry switched on the fan, laughing as my cash, credit cards, driver’s license and receipts flew through the room in a blizzard of personal effects.

It was also here that my father, a family doctor on an anti-cholesterol kick in the 1980s, served butter-substitute and egg-white pancakes to me and my friends on Sunday mornings. My friend Jonathan labeled them “hypocritical pancakes”: While Dad was scrupulous about heart-healthy baking, he tossed scoopfuls of chocolate chips into the batter.

And it was here, in 2006, that my 4-year-old daughter, Rose, discovered my old Matchbox cars in the basement and hauled them upstairs, so that she could read fairy tales to the tiny Corvettes and Camaros before tucking them into bed.

My childhood home had been transformed into a new-age teahouse, and for a moment I mentally scoffed at these robed strangers at the table exuberantly inhaling and exhaling as if they were in a yoga class. But I had signed up for this, so I made an effort to overcome my skepticism and to follow the tea ceremonialist’s instructions.

As I concentrated on my breathing, I allowed my mind to drift … and I remembered that it was also here, a few feet away, on a lavender, L-shaped couch beside the wood-burning stove, that I told my dad I loved him in August 2008. Then I walked onto the deck outside and waved goodbye through one of the living-room windows. He died on the couch later that night.

And it was here, a few years later, that my mom, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, had to evacuate because of a forest fire. The power had gone out in her neighborhood, and I had driven an hour to pick her up and bring her to my home in Denver.

I returned days later, after the fire, to make sure the house was safe. I will never forget what I saw — and smelled.

Mom loved coffee ice cream, and she kept eight or nine quarts of it in her kitchen freezer. She also loved salmon, storing leftovers in recycled Ziploc bags in the same freezer. After the power went out, the salmon thawed, seeped through rips in the used bags, and it congealed with the melted ice cream into a pink-and-beige, fish-and-coffee sludge. I spent half a day cleaning the mess.

My parents, Mort and Dorothy, had built this house in 1983, when I was 14. We had moved to Boulder from Livonia, Mich. They considered suburban Detroit stifling and wanted to start over in the most utopian place they could find — the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where the air smelled like pine trees.

The house was on 10 acres of mountainside property — cheap in those days, because nobody liked the 15-minute commute to downtown Boulder, especially during white-out snowstorms that sealed off the surrounding dirt roads. My parents watched David Letterman on the couch with the wood stove roaring in the winters and read the Sunday newspaper in their pajamas on the deck in the summers. I graduated from high school, went to college and lived all over the United States before getting married and settling in Denver, and the house became my worry-free sanctuary.

After Dad died, my mother lived alone in the house. Gone were the homemade pastries and cookies he liked to bake; in their place was a bowl of blackening bananas. My two brothers and I had to lie to Mom, who had been angrily demanding her independence, in an effort to move her away from the isolated mountains and into an assisted-living condo.

We persuaded her to visit my brother Doug in California while my then-wife, Rose, and I cleared out her furniture and moved some of it to the new place. All over the house we found half-finished Post-its in Mom’s handwriting, reminding herself to take prescribed medications and how to work the TV.

I will never forget Mom’s fear and outrage when we finally told her she would no longer be able to live in the house.

“No. No!”

My oldest brother, Mark, talked Doug and me into sell the place in 2012. The market was still reeling from the financial meltdown, and we felt lucky when a cyclist who worked in the tech industry met our price of $432,000.

He resold it five years later, for $770,000, to the tea ceremonialist, a young woman whose Instagram posts have described the house as “a space that gives you a sacred pause in life to be with yourself, reconnect to what’s important and just be.” During the pandemic, the Zillow value of the house increased to more than $1.2 million.

The tea ceremonialist was charging $25 per person for some of her events. I invited Meredith to join me to revisit my own former sacred space, and we found ourselves seated crossed-legged around the table on a Sunday evening in December.

At the end of the hourlong ceremony, the tea ceremonialist seemed at peace. She told us she had worked in tech before relocating here as a way of freeing herself from the stress and aggression of Silicon Valley. I liked hearing this. It reminded me of my parents.

We sipped the final mug of tea and said our goodbyes. Outside, as Meredith and I walked toward the car, I took a last look down the dirt driveway in the cold, pitch-black night.

I began the drive down the hairpin curves of the twisty mountain road that I knew by reflex. I could see my father teaching me to drive on this very spot 40 years earlier. I pushed down on the gas, heading downward at a nearly 45-degree angle, zipping through the turns.

“Uh,” Meredith said, “aren’t you going a little fast?”

Steve Knopper is an editor at large at Billboard and the author of “MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson.”