The Rural Diaries

by Hilarie Burton

  Gus was alert and curious, wanting to grab all the leaves. He loved the way his feet felt on different things—a plush pile of moss or the rough grooves of tree bark. We discovered a fuzzy caterpillar and then headed back up to the house.

  The real estate agent still wasn’t there, so we settled into the porch swing. The air smelled of wood and water. I took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  “Really?” Jeff grinned and then asked me again, “Really? You’re not freaked out by this?”

  I laughed and shook my head no. “I can do all this. I was born to do this.”

  “Alright Laura Ingalls,” Jeff teased.

  The real estate agent, Rick Reilly, was a sweet guy with a soft spot for kids. After he showed up, we walked through the house with him, and I could see that the kitchen was a project. It was a dark six-by-six-foot square with 1970s heavily trimmed cabinetry and orange Formica countertops. In my brain I was already making Home Depot lists. But there was a big upstairs loft bedroom and a nursery off of that. Downstairs were two more bedrooms begging for more kids. One bathroom was a 1950s baby blue, and the other had a marigold bathtub and sink. It was going to be a lot of work.

  Jeff announced, “We’ll offer them the asking price. Let’s close really quick.”

  The next day, before the deal was even done, we snuck back onto the property. Jeff wanted to look at the outbuildings—a huge two-story barn and a couple of old sheds—places to tinker. While he was poking around, I noticed something glimmering under the porch. It was the house key.

  I dangled it out for Jeff to see and whispered, “Wanna break in?” As if anyone would have heard me. Then we furtively let ourselves in to our new home.

  3

  I went looking for my dreams outside of myself and discovered, it’s not what the world holds for you, it’s what you bring to it.

  —attributed to L. M. Montgomery

  We wanted to have Thanksgiving at the cabin, but it needed so much work. I had tackled plenty of renovations on my home in Wilmington, but I had no idea about septic fields or propane gas or heating systems. Plus this time, I had a deadline, an infant, and was still working on White Collar while Jeff was working down in New Orleans.

  In mid-November I flew into JFK with Gus on a Monday, rented a minivan, and thanked my lucky stars that my little brother John was coming to help. John had been in China for three years and was coming home for his first break since leaving. He’d never met Gus. Hell, he’d never even met Jeffrey. My brother and I did, however, have a family history of doing home renovation projects together.

  When I was growing up, our first family project was stripping wallpaper in the house on Ithaca Road in Sterling Park. The family room wallpaper was horrible, tan with intricate brown drawings that looked like old advertisements from a turn-of-the-century newspaper. In the kitchen the wallpaper was printed with oppressively enormous grapes, oranges, and apples. My brothers and I had a ball trying to see who could pull the longest strips down.

  Since then, we have whitewashed fences and built furniture and removed popcorn ceiling in various Burton properties. Conrad is the patient one. Billy is the organized one. And John is an ox. His help on the cabin was perfectly timed.

  John landed at 6 a.m. Tuesday after a long overnight flight, took a train to meet me in midtown Manhattan, and we hit the ground running. Since there was no furniture at the cabin yet, we rented rooms across the Hudson River at an extended-stay chain hotel. Each morning, we’d run over to my beloved Home Depot, collect whatever materials we needed for the cabin’s transformation that day, and then with baby in tow, we’d drive across the river and down the shady road to our new little sanctuary.

  Gus, thank God, was the easiest baby on the planet. I’d put him down on the one section of carpeted flooring in the dining room, and he’d play with Thomas the Train for hours. Or he’d coo in his swing, rocking back and forth while watching John and me dart all over the house. The previous homeowners had been meticulous in taking care of their home, and so our task was to merely brighten up the joint and bring it up to the twenty-first century.

  We started in the main living space and spider-webbed out. We took off cabinet doors and sanded and primed every inch of that dark oppressive wood. John set up a door-painting station down in the basement so Gus wouldn’t crawl all over them. I’d always wanted to try one of those Rust-Oleum countertop refinishing kits. Who can resist that Cinderella transformation of turning pumpkin-orange Formica into a subtle, relaxing neutral? (I can hear all the hipsters out there lamenting that I didn’t preserve the garish original fixtures—How could you? My friends, it was easy!)

  While cabinetry dried, we assembled a new crib and coordinated deliveries of a couch and new appliances. The propane guy gave me a newcomer lesson in fuel. We replaced sink fixtures and added new lighting to the intensely dark home.

  Jeff has a thing about red bedrooms. For any of you One Tree Hill fans out there, you’ll recall that my character Peyton Sawyer did too. Even her record label was called Red Bedroom Records. So a couple gallons of Ben Moore later, our loft bedroom had gone from bland to cozy and a bit mysterious.

  Since the house was so tiny, storage was massively important. There were virtually no closets, and so I commissioned a local furniture maker to create a one-of-a-kind bed with drawers underneath as a surprise for Jeffrey. As Thanksgiving approached, everyone was winding down, and I begged and begged them to deliver before the break. My experience living in Los Angeles had prepped me to get blown off, but instead, the furniture maker promised me he’d be there on Friday. That was perfect! Jeff was wrapping his movie in Louisiana and would be driving up to our new home on Sunday.

  TVs were installed, curtains were hung, a storage container was delivered from North Carolina. My dad kindly packed up furniture from my Wilmington Victorian and things from his antique store and sent them up. Gus tumbled around in the empty boxes as we organized. Sheets. Dishes. Bookcases. The dining table and chairs.

  By the time we finished up for the day on Thursday, we were exhausted. John and I had lived on a steady diet of Gatorade, granola bars, and Wendy’s. We treated ourselves that night to dinner at the Friendly’s next to the hotel. It was such a throwback to our childhood, getting hotdogs after Little League baseball games, that we couldn’t resist. I was happy working side by side with my brother again, plotting and planning and making shit happen. Eating our hot dogs that night, we were a bit smug. We had two and a half more days before Jeff showed up. We could afford to ease up a bit.

  Friday morning, we took our time checking out of the hotel. We did one more Home Depot and Target run and then made our way to the cabin. The bed was due to arrive in the afternoon, so we unpacked and made lists of what still needed to be done.

  My phone dinged with a text from Jeff.

  Jeff: How’s it going?

  Me: Super good. Can’t wait for you to get here.

  Jeff: See you in 4 hours!

  Wait, what?

  Me: I thought you were still working. Didn’t think you were coming till Sunday!

  Jeff: Got off early! Been driving all night. Love you!

  Shit! “JOHN,” I hollered. “We gotta move!” Unpacked boxes full of odds and ends were stacked all over the place. The cabinet doors still lay drying in the basement. Tile for the kitchen backsplash was still in its packaging.

  You know those design shows that are massively overproduced, where homeowners have to renovate within a certain amount of time? I don’t wanna brag, but John and I would be good at that. We put our heads down and turned that cabin into the cutest fucking thing you ever saw. We kicked out rugs. Tossed throw pillows. Hung pictures. Placed books. Filled the storage container with empty boxes and packaging materials and slammed the door shut—If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist!

  At 3 p.m., the bed arrived! I tipped heavily and thanked the furniture maker profusely as I ushered him and his helpers out the door. We had one hour left. Gus still rocked
in his swing, completely entertained by the chaos.

  I threw up the tile on the backsplash while John reattached cabinet doors. We tossed the one Phillips head screwdriver we had back and forth as we attached hardware on the doors. The sound of gravel crunching in the driveway stopped us. “He’s here!”

  John focused on the last three drawer handles, while I lit a scented candle, put sweet Gus on my hip, and breathlessly opened the front door. “Honey! So glad you’re here!”

  Guys, I was beat. John was a zombie. But the look on Jeff’s face when he saw his dream cabin all put together was something I’ll always cherish. He walked from room to room, touching furniture and the new fridge and the curtains. “I love it,” he said earnestly. “I just love it.”

  I was relieved. And Jeff’s appreciation to John was the beginning of a strong friendship. He continued to take in the new space. “Not sure what you were in such a tizzy about. There was hardly anything to do. Place looks great.”

  John and I exchanged looks. We knew better.

  Only one thing was left undone: we needed a new stove. The old stove was terrifying, to put it politely—and you can’t have Thanksgiving without a fully functioning stove. Jeff is a nutcase about Thanksgiving. He does all the cooking. He had been fantasizing about our first cabin holiday since the day we visited the property. But he couldn’t make his dream dinner on that stove. Multiple burners were inoperable. It made a scary clicking noise. And it was gas, making me fear the whole house would blow up if we used it.

  I had ordered a stove that was scheduled to arrive days ahead of Thanksgiving. But then I got a call: “Orders are backed up because drivers are off for the holiday.” Two days before Thanksgiving, still no stove. I harangued the delivery company. I jumped every time I imagined I heard tires on the gravel driveway. John and I had been cooking everything in a shitty toaster oven, and I’d lie awake at night trying to figure out how I could possibly make Thanksgiving dinner in it.

  The day before Thanksgiving I heard the truck rumbling down the driveway, and I started screaming, “The stove is here!” The three of us adults ran out like kids on Christmas morning. It was the end of the day, and ours was the last delivery. The two delivery guys maneuvered the stove into the kitchen and went to connect the unit to the propane tank. “Ma’am, you’re missing a piece.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s a little safety valve. Connects the fuel source. Your old stove doesn’t have it. Pretty dangerous. We can’t connect the stove without it.” Jeff started asking a million questions. “What do you mean? Can’t you just hook it up anyway and we’ll risk it? Where can we get it?” The guys were shaking their heads. It was like they didn’t understand that the happiness of my entire family was resting upon this stove. Jeff already had a huge local turkey brining in the fridge.

  “Best we can do is come back on Monday or Tuesday with the right part,” they said. I was frantically googling appliance supply stores in the Hudson Valley and jumped on the phone.

  “You have the valve?” A mom-and-pop shop across the river in Saugerties had exactly what we were looking for. But they were closing in twenty minutes.

  “Please! Please stay open for me! I’ll be there in nineteen minutes. Without it we won’t be able to have Thanksgiving,” I begged. There was a long pause.

  “Okay. I’ll be here.”

  I fixed my gaze on the delivery guys and said, “Look, please stay here. I’ll give you any amount of money to just stay here.”

  “It’s fine. We’ll stick around. Go get that part.”

  I couldn’t believe it. The store stayed open for me. The stove guys waited for me. Crossing the river in the dark, I was filled with gratitude. Just by asking people to be nice, they were nice. I wasn’t in LA anymore. I could feel myself settling in.

  Jeffrey made coffee for the delivery crew and entertained them while I shuttled back and forth across the river, so incredibly in love with our new community.

  The next day, Jeff rose early and got to work in the kitchen. We all took turns in the baby-size kitchen, chopping and prepping, doing dishes, setting the table. John and Gus wore matching cable knit sweaters and wrestled. I focused on the pies.

  The sun set and we lay out all the food across the dining table. John had missed eating the typical American fare while in China, and Jeff hadn’t had a real meal the entire time he had been filming. There’s something about constantly moving in high gear—when you have the opportunity to stop, you almost don’t know how. But sitting down and saying grace for Thanksgiving, I took the moment in with great consciousness.

  Dear God. Thank you for our family. Thank you for this new adventure. Thank you for this happiness. Please help us to pay it forward.

  * * *

  After Thanksgiving, John left, and Jeff, Gus, and I holed up in our cabin. Our biggest outings were to the candy store in Rhinebeck. Jeff learned that the elegant, curly-haired owner was Ira Gutner, and the store, Samuel’s, was named after his late uncle Samuel. Ira and Uncle Samuel had an affinity for going to Yankee games, and before every game they’d stop at a penny candy store right outside of the stadium. In those aisles of sugary delight, Ira’s uncle used candy to teach Ira everything he needed to know about the world of business. Ira grew up to become a successful entrepreneur in the fabric industry in Manhattan. He attributed all his success to those childhood lessons, and when he retired early and moved upstate, he opened up his own sweet shop and named it Samuel’s.

  Samuel’s became a town headquarters for Jeff. He went there almost every day, under the guise of picking up something for me. Ira sold chocolate bark with sea salt and almonds and cranberries, and Jeff and I devoured it at an embarrassing speed. But Jeff also went there just to get coffee and talk to Ira—find out the gossip in town and what places to go and restaurants to try—and then he’d come home and share that information with me.

  “There’s a salvage place in Red Hook. That young guy who works at the shop? His parents run it. Might try to pop in.” Or “Ira says we’ve got to try the French place in town—Le Petit Bistro. It ain’t Paris, but it’s supposed to be great.” Or “Ira’s gal that makes chocolate has a baby the same age as Gus and she wants to have a play date.” Oh, Ira—dressed in his plaid shirts or turtleneck sweaters or overalls when he was feeling particularly “country.” He was so invested in our happiness.

  One of his first edicts was that we had to attend the Sinterklaas festival. A Christmas festival! I didn’t need to be persuaded.

  The Dutch brought the legend of Santa Claus to America in the 1600s when they settled here. In the mid-1980s, celebration-artist Jeanne Fleming brought the Dutch tradition back to life with a children’s parade through the streets of Rhinebeck. Twenty years later, after much success as the director of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, Jeanne came back in 2008 with a bevy of artists and musicians and resurrected the festival with the help of an army of townspeople. Sinterklaas, based on St. Nicholas, rides through the main drag in Kingston, on the other side of the river, and then crosses the Hudson on a boat covered with Christmas lights. He arrives at the train station where the Rhinebeck children greet him, hooting and laughing loudly. Then they parade through town.

  Ira invited us to be his guests, which meant we had use of the bench outside the sweet shop. A good thing too, because not five minutes after we parked on one of the side streets and made our way over to Market Street, the whole town had congregated. Everybody was holding glowing white star lanterns with Christmas lights glimmering through the holes. A pack of children carrying pine branches festooned with tinsel led the parade. The most beautiful Sinterklaas/Santa Claus followed with a long, snowy beard and bright robes of crushed red velvet. Then a wild puppet show swirled down the street. The puppets, which are two stories tall, careened along while all of us cheered and clapped.

  Turkey Wars

  The very first Thanksgiving Jeffrey and I had together, he came to North Carolina to celebrate the holiday with my famil
y. They’d met only once before. I was mildly nervous. “I’ll make the turkey,” my mother said. She’d made the turkey my whole life.

  “No, no,” Jeffrey replied. “I’ll be making the turkey.”

  Good lord. It was like watching two alpha animals circle and size each other up before mauling one another. It was settled that they both would be making a turkey, and all our guests would vote on which was better. So Jeffrey and my mother went to town. Mom brined hers. Jeffrey went with injections for his. They jockeyed over oven space, and a copious amount of shit was talked.

  But no one had considered what all the guests would be doing while this cook-off took place. Decades before, my preschool teacher Mrs. Allison had given my mother a recipe for “Witches Brew,” a hot harvest drink meant to warm up even the coldest of days. As kids, we were given the booze-free version of this sugary treat (Mrs. Allison was fond of adding a splash of whiskey to her brew), but as grownups, we discovered that it lived up to its name as an instigator of debauchery. Naturally, this particular Thanksgiving during the Turkey Wars, Witches Brew was readily available and a huge hit with our crowd.

  Before the first course even started, the adults had dissolved into a mess of giggles and unruliness. My friend Nick had wanted to contribute, and so he labored for days over a butternut squash bisque. Everyone cackled as he tried to steady himself enough to ladle it out at each place setting. By the time the turkeys were presented for judgment, it was a lost cause. Jeff tried my mother’s. “It’s fabulous,” he admitted. My mother sampled his recipe. “Oh God, that’s good!” she exclaimed.