The Rural Diaries

by Hilarie Burton

  What had started off as a wildly stressful cage match became a love-fest of food, family, and friends. And I had the Witches Brew to thank.

  Witches Brew

  Keep in mind that this recipe is from the 1980s!

  6 tea bags of your choice (I use a spice tea)

  1 can frozen orange juice

  1 can frozen lemonade

  3 cinnamon sticks

  1 tablespoon cloves

  Grab the biggest pot in your kitchen and add 4 quarts of water. Bring to a slow boil and add the tea bags. Let steep for 7 minutes. Remove the tea bags and add the frozen juice, lemonade, cinnamon sticks, and cloves. Simmer on medium heat for at least 30 minutes. To serve, strain out the spices and ladle into a teacup. Splash in a healthy dose of whiskey to make it interesting.

  * * *

  Gus nestled up on Jeff’s shoulders, and we huddled together, limbs numb, chins and noses frozen and red. We had become dots in a sea of Christmas cheer—a part of something. The drums of the marching bands kept the entire town in rhythm, everyone dancing together to create warmth. Costumed marchers tossed candy to the kids perched on the curbs for a closer look. Alpacas and donkeys in elaborate South American harnesses pranced down the main drag like royalty.

  We took Gus to his first Christmas Eve service at a handsome little chapel down the road. The elderly congregation oohed and aahed over our funny little boy, who clapped and sang “ba ba ba ba” during the hymns. Christmas Day was a tiny, intimate affair—just Jeffrey, Gus, and me. We taught him how to open presents for the first time, burning the wrapping in the roaring fire Jeff built.

  In his red long underwear, purchased proudly from the Rhinebeck Department Store, Jeff opened his gift from me. A note in the box said “Go to the garage.” With the help of my dad, we’d gotten the local ATV dealer to stealthily deliver a Yamaha Rhino so Jeff could tear around the woods. Figuring that eventually we’d need to plow the incredibly long driveway, it was also a functional tool, as well as a ridiculously fun one. Jeff was like a little kid. Our quiet cul-de-sac was now filled with the roaring of the Rhino’s engine and Jeff’s whooping. “Be careful!” I called out.

  He skidded to a stop. “You and Gus get dressed and get in here!”

  Together we played all day like children. And the next day, as if on cue, it snowed twenty-four inches.

  In February, Jeff was off to Canada to do a project and then stuck in LA doing press for a bit. I was working on White Collar when spring arrived. Sometimes on my day off I’d get a babysitter to stay in the city with Gus so I could drive to the cabin and mow the lawn or paint the shed for a few hours. Being up there and doing something with my hands calmed me. I felt entirely alone and peaceful. In Rhinebeck I was comfortable in my own skin. I could go to the hardware store with no makeup and wearing my dad’s old fatigues. And unlike in LA, I had people to say hello to.

  Our neighbor, Farmer Mike, was a former firefighter and a great storyteller. He had lived right there in that tiny community forever, raising kids who had long since left the nest. He knew every person who lived on the street and knew who lived in their houses before they did. Mike’s wife, Marcia, made lovely paintings of all the lighthouses in the Hudson Valley. She invited us to tour her studio and gifted us with a painting that we hung in the cabin.

  Mike hung NO TRESPASSING signs for us, and when we weren’t around, he chased off kids who snuck onto our property to ride their dirt bikes. He reminded me of my dad, always prepared for worst-case scenarios. Mike told us where to buy a huge shipping container to store supplies and how to live off the land. Once, our clothes dryer went haywire and started smoking. It wasn’t on fire, but we weren’t sure what to do, so we called the volunteer fire department and told them it wasn’t an emergency but it would be great if they could send someone out. Mike, who used to hang around listening to the scanner, arrived before the first fire truck showed up. Gus and I avoided the fray and sat in the car down the driveway. It must have been a slow day, because no fewer than five trucks showed up, from all different parts of the county. Mike was gladly on hand to greet and communicate with each one.

  We learned from Mike that an entire family lived right along our road. Bob and his wife, Rachel, are lovely people about my age. Her parents lived two doors down from us, her older sister lived a few doors down from them, and her aunt and uncle lived just three houses down from them. Rachel grew up playing with the kids who lived in our house and knew our property better than I did. They had heard that I collected taxidermy, and when they came by to introduce themselves, Bob showed up with a fox pelt. The fox had been killed by a car, and as a taxidermist Bob recognized that it was too beautiful to just leave on the road, so he’d tended the hide and brought it to us as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift. I thought, These are my people.

  Williams Lumber is a dynasty in the Hudson Valley, run by the patriarch, Stacy, and his children. That first year, Jeffrey and I were in the Rhinebeck location just about every day. We became familiar with the staff, and I’m pretty sure they laughed whenever we left.

  “You all need anything else?” they’d ask as we checked out.

  “I’m sure we’ll think of something,” we’d respond.

  They knew everything about what we were working on—whether it was painting the hallway or tiling the bathroom. I quickly learned that in a small town, everybody knows your business. It becomes a town affair, and you just have to get comfortable with that. The anonymity of our days in LA and NYC was gone. Quickly, we felt like we were part of something.

  The whole front yard was filled with brambles of wild roses. It was a gorgeous stronghold of thorns, ready to make a pincushion out of Gus, so Jeffrey and I pulled them all out. We cleared the area around the house of the brambles and saplings, and then we started experimenting with what would grow in our shady yard. The soil was totally different from the soil in North Carolina and California. We planted a couple of Christmas trees in the front yard because we knew that was the end game. Once we had our first spring and saw the apple and peach orchards, Jeff got excited about all the flowering trees. He missed his bougainvillea back in LA, so he went to the nursery and picked out one of every flowering tree that they had. “We’ll just plant them all and see what happens,” he said.

  I got window boxes and painted them red to pop against the dark logs of the cabin. I mixed taller annuals like aster with more compact blooms, always adding a bit of creeping Jenny. That had been my secret-weapon plant down in North Carolina; it grew anywhere and came back year after year. But I learned they don’t call it that up north.

  “Can you tell me where to find the creeping Jenny?” I inquired. It was as though I’d asked for the local peeping Tom. The raised eyebrows and tilted heads hinted that I’d made a mistake. “It’s like a vine, tiny roundish leaves . . . kind of neon green?”

  “Oh, you mean the aurea?” Sure. Aurea. That’s what we’ll call it now.

  The only open, sunlit space at the cabin was on top of the septic system. And I really didn’t want to grow food in a septic field. Instead, I planted forsythia, impatiens, and woodland flowers that grow well in rocky soil. Jeff and I actually got into a fight about the forsythia. As a West Coast boy, he had never seen it, and the neon yellow of the blossoms captivated him. Huge hedges of the flowering bushes lined the roads and sent up fireworks of flowers in front of the businesses in town. But I was dead set against them. My entire life my father had told us stories about his mother sending him to the forsythia bushes to pick out the switch she would whip him with. He hated them. Which meant I hated them. All Burtons hated them. Jeffrey brought five of them home anyway. Ugh, the betrayal. I had to admit though, they were striking.

  I was becoming less Burton, more Morgan.

  To help balance the two, I planted tulips and irises and all the bulbs that my mom and her Dutch family grew. Her bulbs were a sight to behold when I was growing up: crocuses, then daffodils, then tulips, and then the lilies of summer. It was a parade of gran
deur.

  Ira also sent us over to Hoffman’s Barn, a nondescript treasure trove hidden in the back of a movie theater parking lot. Roger and Pam Hoffman found the beauty in the bygone: an entire building full of old doors and windows; another building segmented into sections dedicated to china, bureaus, wingback chairs, hatchets, and kids’ toys; outside, rusted farm equipment, old logging saws, and various jewels in all shapes and forms. Roger came out and showed us around, and Pam, shy but warm, immediately made us feel at ease.

  They both doted on Gus, explaining to him what the old tools and toys were. Gus was going through a massive John Henry phase. Roger ushered him over to a low shelf of hammers—sledgehammers, rubber mallets, framing hammers. It was the island of lost toys for freaks like us who like tools that come with a narrative. Roger selected a huge wooden mallet with scars and tiny chunks missing. That mallet had seen action. “For you, John Henry,” he said, handing the surprisingly light tool to Gus. There’s not a toy in the world that could have compared with that gift.

  Everything I’ve ever needed I’ve found at Hoffman’s Barn. In the summer we bought some wooden half barrels and filled them with herbs. And when my birthday rolled around, Jeff went out to Hoffman’s and found an old tractor seat that he mounted and placed in a wooden frame he built himself. He had made me some “fart”—that’s “farm art.” The stark contrast between my previous birthday and this one, made up of crafts and time spent together, was balm for my heart. We had grown together as a couple, as a family. This was who we were meant to be—as individuals and artists and as a couple.

  We kept the house in LA, but the truth is that once we were in the cabin with its shitty kitchen, weird linoleum floor, Technicolor bathrooms, leaky windows, and creaky front door, we never wanted to leave. On paper, the LA house was a great family house, but we didn’t feel like a family there. We felt like a family in the one-thousand-square-foot cabin.

  4

  She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. “I’d always be miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here.”

  —Willa Cather, My Antonia

  By the time December rolled around the following year, we’d found a groove, but still we were all coming and going in dizzying patterns. My youngest brother, Conrad, was graduating from college, and I went home to North Carolina for his graduation. John was finally home for good, and it was the first time my whole family was going to be together in three years. Jeffrey wasn’t working, but he decided not to go with me. I was hot about it, but I didn’t say anything outright; in fact, I barely said anything at all.

  Jeff called me from Los Angeles. “I miss you guys so much. Are you having fun?”

  “We’re having a great time. You’re missing it.” I said shortly.

  The next night when we spoke, I reported, “We took Gus to see Santa. You missed it.” I was really disappointed, and my family was a bit insulted. It was a sore spot.

  We were doing Christmas in LA that year, and Jeff’s way of making it up to me after not going to my brother’s graduation was to agree to go to church on Christmas Eve. (He’s convinced every year that he’s going to burst into flames at church. It hasn’t happened. Yet.) So the three of us set out to go to the children’s service at a little nondenominational church in Studio City.

  Outside the church was a living nativity. Donkeys, alpacas, sheep, and cows roamed around in the front yard of the church, with men and women in Jerusalem’s finest fashions tending to them. Little kids dressed as angels shrieked with laughter as they ran through the crowds, goosing people with their wings. “This is adorable!” I yelled to Jeff over the chaos. He grinned as Gus, now a highly active toddler, plowed through the sea of bodies to get to the animals. Gus reached his hand out and screamed with giggles when a goat nibbled at him. Then the church bell rang.

  Suddenly, nothing was adorable anymore. Whoever had the bright idea to put the fun stuff before the service did not take into account that kids are unreasonable creatures. No amount of “We can see ’em after the service, buddy!” could calm the storm that was Gus. Folks around us started up with the fan favorite “Joy to the World” as our boy flung himself into the aisle and ran to the big double doors and banged on them with balled fists.

  Side note: Please don’t think we are negligent parents. I’m a stickler for manners and good behavior. Our boy was widely known for tipping his hat to ladies (a trick Jeff had taught him) and acting like a little adult. But these barnyard creatures were his kryptonite!

  Jeff looked at me. “Do you want to stay?”

  “No,” I said, crestfallen. I had just wanted to sing “The Little Drummer Boy” with Gus folded in my arms.

  “Do you want to drive around and look at Christmas lights?” Jeff asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  We drove in the dark and listened to carols on the radio. It was lovely, but it also felt very quiet and very small. Having come from celebrating with my big family, it felt hollow out in LA without our relatives or community. I’d gotten used to the bustle of our Hudson Valley life and constantly running into familiar faces. Trying to function in LA was harder than ever before.

  The next morning Jeff made coffee and we opened gifts. Gus tore into his presents, and then I got up to go make breakfast, feeling the letdown of a holiday ending.

  “Hold on, there’s something in the tree,” Jeff said.

  I looked, and there was a white envelope that read “HILARIE.” I opened it up, thinking it was a gift certificate. But inside was a piece of paper that read “MORGAN.”

  I turned around, and Jeffrey was down on one knee with the ring.

  I wept. He wept. And then he explained that he’d stayed back in LA rather than go to North Carolina because he was in the process of designing and buying my ring. I felt like such an ass for giving him a hard time! (Big life lesson kids. Just don’t be an ass. You never know when someone is planning a sweet surprise!) Meanwhile my entire family was very smug that the secret had been kept and I was finally gonna be a bonafide married lady.

  “Do you guys have a date in mind yet?” my mom asked.

  “We’re working on it,” I assured her. And we were. Jeff and I would zero in on a month, and then Jeff would book a job. We’d pick another date, and then I would book a gig.

  I also wondered whether it was silly to get married when we were already living as husband and wife. I certainly didn’t need a party. I wanted wedding planning to be enjoyable, and it wasn’t. So we decided to back-burner the wedding. “We’ll do it when it’s super fun,” I said, and kissed Jeffrey.

  * * *

  At the cabin I took a lot of pride in trying to fulfill the same duties that my mom had while I was growing up. I liked being self-sufficient. I liked being able to say that I was doing everything. I’d look at a magazine on Tuesday and decide I was going to build a window bench seat. I’d paint the walls the next day. Then I’d do the trim. Then I’d figure out the curtains. The cabin was an evolving renovation. Our visions for our life and our home were evolving too. We went on walks together in the woods and dreamed stuff up.

  While I still worked down in NYC, my brother Billy came out from LA to help when Jeff had knee surgery. All this rugged living took a toll on my former high school basketball star. His knees had always been an issue, and we were assured that the surgeon in town, Andrew Stewart, was the very best. And he was. Billy helped Jeff out around the cabin and looked after Gus. And a couple of days after the surgery, the two of them decided to buy a huge wooden swing set to assemble in the yard, complete with a tower and a slide. So much for taking it easy.

  Jeffrey has always played sentimental characters that sweep women off their feet with gentle words and thoughtful inclusions. Real-life Jeff? Well, he’s an entirely different kind of magic man. He pays compliments only when he really means them. He is 100 percent about actions over words. And so on
e spring morning, over coffee, Jeffrey asked, “Wanna build a fire pit today?” That’s Jeff’s code for: I’d like to spend time with you. Exactly my kind of romance.

  There was a small portion of stone wall along the back of our property. It had fallen in on itself and wasn’t doing much good keeping the deer or teenagers on dirt bikes out. So we salvaged the stones, heaving them into the back of the Rhino until we’d loaded the bed well past capacity. Once back at the site he’d prepped for the fire pit, we worked in tandem finding exactly the right stones to fit together. He could have taken me on a jet to Paris for dinner and it wouldn’t have meant half as much as building that pit together. Once the steel ring was completely covered, Jeff gleefully leaped into Boy Scout mode, building his base of kindling and tinder to create a roaring blaze that burned through the wet springtime chill.

  In the spring we started going to the Rhinebeck farmers’ market every Sunday in the town’s municipal parking lot. We’d walk from one white-tented booth to another, collecting a colorful riot of vegetables and fruits. The very frank cheesemonger dictated recommendations to each customer. “You’re going to try this,” I heard her announce to the older man in front of me. Then she fixed me with her stern gaze and handed me a piece of cheese. “You’re going to like this one.” I had blind faith in her ability to read my cheese fortune. There were the woodworkers who made cutting boards out of wood from the trees on their property, a beekeeper with a huge hive case that had a glass window so you could see all the bees at work. Gus always jostled his way up through the swarm of kids. At the market Jeff radiated charm.

  The Want-To Creates the How-To

  Things I’ve built: A bar. A couch. A king-size bed. Multiple coffee tables. A bathroom vanity. Outdoor furniture. Bookshelves. Raised garden beds. And it all started with a fireplace mantel at my parents’ house.