The Rural Diaries

by Hilarie Burton

  I pored over scripts. There was an overwhelming theme in that year’s crop of pilots. Slut cops. Captains who get frisky when they’re stressed. FBI agents who can’t help but kiss their co-workers. These babes were women in power, but they were also DTF.

  I approached these auditions like I would any job. I did some research, looked at real female officers, paid close attention to how they dressed, talked, carried themselves, wore their hair.

  The feedback from casting directors was hilarious.

  “What’d they say?” I asked Meg after one audition for a job I really, really, really wanted.

  “Well honey, they said you were . . . frigid.”

  And another one, “They’d like to know if you could come back and change your hair and clothes.”

  “Change them how?”

  “Edgier? ‘More dangerous’ is the note I got.”

  “So . . . slutty?”

  “Exactly.”

  I do not exaggerate when I say this went on for dozens of auditions. I even ran into Sophia Bush in the waiting room on more than one occasion. “Can you believe this shit?” we lamented. If only they would cast us—then we could use our powers of persuasion and common sense to convince the producers that after a woman investigates a grisly murder scene and finds out her dad is the culprit, she does not want to take her shirt off for some dude. No matter how hard he smolders.

  My plans of being a power female were going down in flames.

  But then I got a call. “Remember the hot biker cop role?” Meg asked.

  Yeah, I remembered. “Well, you didn’t get that. But Michael Peña is the lead and he’s getting a say in who plays his ex-wife, so they want you to come in and read with him.”

  Playing the role of a nagging, concerned ex-wife? Mother to a small son? Don’t have to get naked or be sexy or brood? Wear sensible shoes? I could do that in my sleep. Michael picked me out of the lot. I don’t want to brag, but my nagging is definitely Emmy worthy.

  But the show didn’t get picked up.

  Hence my availability for the Christmas movie offer, which felt to me like a step backward. But then the producers told me that Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross, the parents from Family Ties, were going to play my parents. What? How cool. I couldn’t say no.

  When I read the script, I saw that no one was asking me to do anything inappropriate. I didn’t have to take my shirt off. I didn’t have to say provocative things. There was barely a kiss at the end of the movie. The shoot was only three weeks long, so I didn’t even have to hire a full-time nanny. I needed only a babysitter to help me out. The idea that I could do these little tiny spurts of work that I felt good about and be a mom for the rest of the year was very appealing.

  At first, I was defensive about doing these kinds of jobs—it’s only three weeks, they pay women what they’re worth, they don’t make me take my clothes off—rather than just admitting that I liked doing them and that I also liked to crochet, garden, and watch old movies. There was so much pressure when I was in my twenties, when independent film was ascendant and everyone wanted to play a heroin addict or a sex worker, to make “art” films. But in this odd little holiday genre, I unexpectedly found my power-woman roles. I had control in casting and script changes and how my character looked and dressed. This was a revelation!

  My feminist manifesto came in the form of an elf costume.

  I’m interested in making art that helps an audience feel good and inspired to rise to the occasion. If I can make people comfortable enough to hear the message and be empowered, then that’s good art to me.

  Quickly, my favorite gigs became working for Lifetime because women are valued on those jobs. The most important player is a woman. The audience is decidedly female. The directors and writers, all women. A woman is always number one on the call sheet. So, I was happily making movies about stressed-out women living fast-paced city lives and then going to the country to find some homespun love. Sound familiar?

  The first week on these jobs is always about getting to know co-workers. We ask each other the usual questions: Where do you live? What do you do on the weekends? Do you have kids? Over and over I found myself having to explain that I didn’t live in California or New York. When I’d say, “I live in a log cabin and my husband chops wood to keep our house warm,” I had to laugh out loud, and whomever I was talking to would inevitably say, “Oh my God, your life is a Christmas movie.”

  They weren’t wrong, and I was incredibly grateful. I had never felt more supported professionally in my entire life. Paul and Jules were cheering me on. Barbara and Dick and the ladies who worked for them at the department store were over the moon that I started doing Christmas movies set in little towns just like ours.

  The Christmas movies also meant I had plenty of time for Gus, but now that he was going to be in school with Ms. Patty, my days would start to become mine again, and it made sense to start trying for that second baby.

  Jeff was reluctant. Gus had been a miracle baby, and he was growing into a special kid. The three of us had found a great balance, and Jeffrey was afraid of upsetting the scales. He would say, “Gus is perfect. We’re perfect. It’s easy to travel as a family. Let’s not throw a monkey wrench into this.”

  I felt rejected that he didn’t want to grow our family the way we’d initially planned. I hadn’t signed up to have a one-kid family. I wanted to be pregnant again. I loved feeling like my body was a science experiment, and choosing natural childbirth had given me a lot of confidence. That was really empowering. Not to mention, I had found something I was good at, and it seemed crazy to do it only once. I didn’t want to be greedy and ask for too much, but I desperately wanted another child.

  6

  You never know what you are going to want until you see it clearly.

  —Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

  The memory of Grandma Dee Dee’s pig farm loomed large in Jeff’s imagination. At a young age, he’d camp there for the summer, sleeping in an old airstream trailer in the middle of a field. Grandma’s right-hand man, Clem, would grunt at him from time to time and make sure Jeff was flush with potatoes, which he baked over his little campfire. He was Huck Finn, independent and curious. The farm fed that. Now that Gus was getting older, he wanted those things for his son.

  “We need a hundred acres,” Jeff would say. “Get some goats. Pigs. Cows. Let Gus sleep in the middle of the fields like I used to do at Grandma D’s house.”

  I loved the idea of having land where I could grow Gus his food, raise animals, and be more self-sufficient. And wanting a bigger house with more bedrooms seemed like a very good sign that Jeff was warming up to adding to our family.

  We started putting the word out that we were interested in buying a farm.

  Connie, our favorite no-bullshit waitress at Pete’s Diner, got involved. Jeff and I always sat in her section. I’d get the Western omelet, Jeff was a devotee of the Eggs Benedict, and before we even ordered Connie would come to the table with Gus’s favorite hash browns, a ton of ketchup, and a bowl of fruit. So when Connie found out we were looking, she encouraged us to check out a house on the main drag that looked like something out of The Godfather. Large iron gates and overdone stonework shadowed the driveway. We were grateful for her help but were looking for something a little more . . . subtle.

  Over at the Rhinebeck Department Store, Dick and Barbara caught wind of our quest. “Come over!” they insisted. They were getting ready to downsize from their historic home on a chunk of land to a townhouse in the Village. It wasn’t even on the market yet, but as we rolled down their serene driveway past the fenced-in pastures, the daydreams kicked in. I liked the narrative of our sweet friends passing down their wonderfully curated historic home so that another family—ours—could grow and make memories in the space. The main room had a large fireplace and bookshelves for my obsessive collection. It was charming and warm. But it had many, many levels, as older homes tend to do. Back in the day, the kitchen was usu
ally an entirely separate building. So little hallways and odd nooks filled in the gaps. Attics got turned into loft bedrooms. Additions were tacked on here and there. With a little dude who was barely walking—or for the kids I was hoping to have—it was worrisome.

  When we walked into Samuel’s, I’d holler, “Hiya handsome!” And if Ira had seen me coming, he’d hand me a freshly made hot mocha (since I’m a child and basically like adult hot chocolate), and John Traver, who had started working with Ira when he was fifteen and was now a store manager, would quietly smile and ask Gus what he felt like having. Then Ira would lean out the doorway of his office at the back of the shop as we leaned across the counter and talk to Jeff and me about all the boring stuff we needed to know, like which area had better water or what the politics were like in each small town. “The Red Hook schools are better at sports, and the Rhinebeck schools have more arts programs.”

  Then he’d whisper conspiratorially, “But really, you should come over by where my husband and I live.” Ira was adamant that we move to Milan, which is pronounced My-lan, and if you say it the wrong way, you might as well put up a neon sign saying I’M NOT FROM HERE. Milan was close to Gus’s preschool, which was appealing. But on top of that, Ira painted a picture of dinner parties and evening strolls and plenty of rolling green acreage to keep us busy. We quickly started trolling the real estate websites for Milan listings.

  Ira was very protective of our family. One summer day we had been milling about the coffee shop gabbing with Ira and John. After falling in love with the St. James Cheese Company during all his time filming in New Orleans, Jeffrey was sharing his daydream with Ira and plotting about having a sweet shop and a savory shop.

  John was giving Gus and me a “sample” of Celeste’s bark, as if we hadn’t each eaten about a ton of it over the previous two years, when a woman walked into the store and recognized Jeffrey and then started whipping out her phone before announcing that we had to take a picture.

  Jeffrey and I have always been people pleasers; we never want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but we were also extremely protective of Gus. Even so, saying “no” was hard. But Ira swooped between the camera and me, and in his frank but gracious way said, “Please, this is their family time. They moved here because they want to avoid all that.”

  Ira understood us deeply and wanted only our friendship. In the years we’d known him, it would have done his shop so much good if he had posted a picture of us on his website, but he never asked for anything—not an autograph or selfie or endorsement of any kind. Ira’s friendship was a balm for Jeffrey. Most people just wanted to talk to Jeffrey about work, but Ira wanted to talk about cheese and chocolate and property.

  We kept looking, hoping to find something in Milan. We found a log cabin on a deep slope of acreage that had a guesthouse and its own nine-hole golf course and a basement designed for a serious prepper. But it was forty-five minutes from Rhinebeck, and we didn’t want to be that far from our friends, so we kept looking.

  Then one day Ira called and told us, “There’s an old farm very close to my place. It’s gorgeous! You have to come see it right away.”

  My stomach fluttered as we drove up the driveway to a beautiful eighteenth-century light-blue farmhouse with a huge party barn where the owner had been hosting weddings. Pathways of slate connected the barns, the guesthouse, and the main house. The original portion of the home was paneled in ancient wood, and fireplaces graced every room. A huge, tasteful addition had been built, creating a thousand-square-foot bonus room for toys. You know how many Thomas the Train tracks you can fit into a room that size?

  The woman selling the place was a beekeeper, and besides the apiary she had goats and sheep and cows here and there. I looked out an upstairs window across her rocky fields and thought of my teenage obsession, Wuthering Heights. It was craggy land with animals roaming all over the place and no neighbors in sight. And Jeffrey had always been a bit of a Heathcliff (probably what I was attracted to). I could see the next twenty years of our lives unfolding across those fields.

  But it turned out that years before, someone had given a right-of-way, an easement, to a local farmer so he could feed his cattle, which meant that there was a public thoroughfare through the middle of the property, right up to the kitchen window of the home, where strangers and stalkers could show up at any time.

  When our agent, Rick, called me with the news, I felt like a child—my eyes stung, my throat ached, and I chewed on my lip trying not to cry. We consulted lawyers. I spent countless hours on the phone with my mother—a very successful real estate agent—trying to find a way around this obstacle. But it was no use. The blue house on the hill just wasn’t going to work.

  I was devastated. I drove by that house after school drop-off for a solid week.

  One October morning Rick called me. He was at a brokers’ open house on a horse farm that was going on the market. “You need to get in your car and get over here now because there’s going to be multiple offers.” His voice was electric.

  “Jeff, Gus, we’ve gotta go,” I called out into the cabin unnecessarily loudly, given that we were all sitting within three feet of one another.

  I hurriedly put a blue striped sweater under Gus’s toddler overalls and thrust his feet into his boots. We threw ourselves into the car, and fifteen minutes later we were pulling up a long gravel driveway that sliced through a sea of Kentucky bluegrass flown in by the owners for their horses. The original farmhouse, which was built in the late 1800s, was tucked away on the left, and at the top of the hill we could see a newer, one-story timber-frame home.

  I looked over at Jeffrey and could see it in him right away. We hadn’t even gotten out of the car before he said, “This is it.”

  Sitting right in the front yard was a huge tom turkey. Fearless, Gus got out of the car and ran to the bird, which was as big as him, and started to follow the turkey around.

  All these buildings, all this land. It was gorgeous, but it was also intimidating. Because of Jeff’s work and travel schedule, I did most of the housework at the cabin by myself, so this looked like a lot of work to me. But it was one of those beautiful autumn days when the trees are flaming orange and red against a bright blue sky. From the top of the hill you could see 360 degrees in all directions. I felt like Julie Andrews up in the Alps at the beginning of The Sound of Music. I kept turning in every direction, and everywhere I looked there was a different story—the barns with the animals coming and going as they pleased; way off in the distance the steeple of an old church; and all around, trees and sky.

  We were all in.

  The owner, Sunny, and her lovely husband were at the open house. The farm had been their part-time place where Sunny had kept her horses and the family had celebrated holidays and enjoyed vacations. Now, they were trading it in to travel the world together. All the local brokers were there too. Ed Hackett, who runs the farm supply store and moonlights as a broker, was texting his client, Amar’e Stoudemire, who was playing for the Knicks and wanted a weekend retreat.

  We whirled in and took over. We said hi to Rick and then honed in on the listing agent. She had lived in the community her whole life, and her father had kept cows on this property. We walked along the three miles of fence, rode in a four-wheeler down to the tree line, and crawled through the woods to see the old stone walls that mark the property lines. Gus was on a tear; he wanted to get into everything. Sunny had grandkids who were the same age as Gus, and I think she and her family were excited by the thought of continued family life in the house.

  Then we went down to the original farmhouse. Outside of the little white house were gardens that had been there since the 1930s or 1940s. The trees alongside the house were enormous old catalpa trees. Under one of them we found two headstones.

  Growing up in Virginia I was used to seeing family cemeteries surrounded by wrought-iron fences in antiquated front yards. Everyone keeps their people as close as possible. You don’t have to go far to visit Grandma, Great-G
randma, and Great-Great-Grandpa—they’re right out by the mailbox. For a moment I was worried that people were buried in what would be my yard. But then Jeff crouched down and touched the hand-carved stones. The one on the left read Mischief, 1936 to 1950; the one on the right read Mischief 2, 1951 to 1960. “The man who built the farm was a cat lover,” the listing agent told us. I ran my fingers along the chisel marks he’d made so many years ago.

  Sunny, Tom the turkey, and the family’s little dog walked us to our truck. We hugged Sunny goodbye and warmly pressed the hand of the listing agent; then, as they walked away, we had a huddle with Rick that went something like this:

  Jeff: We’re gonna buy this house. We’ll give them full ask. (Rick opened his mouth to speak.)

  Me: We’re all gonna drive away right now. Rick, let’s do whatever we gotta do to get our offer in within the hour.

  Rick: Okay.

  We weren’t playing hardball. We wanted it. We were ready for it. I don’t think Sunny ever even had other people go through the house.

  As we got into the car to drive back to the cabin, I said to Jeff, “Should we call it Mischief Farm?”

  He smiled. There was just no other name for it. It was always going to be that.

  7

  His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!”—which he had adopted as his personal motto.

  —George Orwell, Animal Farm

  One condition Sunny had before she would accept the offer was that we had to go over for lunch at the house. We had to prove that we weren’t going to buy her home and then destroy it. Sunny needed to know that whoever took over the farm was going to treat the place well. We met Sunny’s children and grandchildren, her neighbors, and the farm employees. Once she got a sense that we really loved the farm for the same reasons she did, she took me under her wing.

  We passed our vetting in October but couldn’t move in until January; the family wanted one last Christmas in the house, which I understood—but man, those few months were agonizing. The farm was fifteen minutes from the cabin, so Jeff and I would drop Gus off at school and drive by the farm real slow, talking about all the things we wanted to do.