Jeff and Gus met me at Osaka for a quick family dinner. “How’s it going over there?” Jeff asked.
“It’s a zoo! The marriage proposal is happening right before the parade, so I’ll text everyone when the guy gets there. They’re cute kids. The bride’s mom is a regular customer.”
I raced back over to the shop and hung out in the back office with the hopeful fiancé, feeling a little giddy to be part of someone’s big romantic moment. Our two high school employees were positioned to capture the whole affair with their smartphone cameras. With the future groom and his father nervously chatting in the back, John and I eyeballed the front door, waiting for the mother of our unsuspecting romantic victim to come in. I spotted the mom through the big front window and tucked back into my hiding place. From out by the cash register I heard John greet her extra loudly, “It’s so good to see you!”
She was equally as loud and I was dying. “Good to see you John! This is my daughter. She’s a big One Tree Hill fan, and we were just curious whether Hilarie was around.”
“Oh yes, she’s just in the back,” John said. “Hilarie? Are you free?” His acting was pretty bad, but the daughter had no idea. I popped my head out, desperately trying to keep a straight face.
“What’s up, bud?”
“There’s someone out front who wants to say hi.” I ducked under the counter and gave her a hug.
“It’s so nice to meet you. Your mom has told me a lot about you.” She gave her mother one of those looks a girl can only give her mother, but then went on to talk about the show, how happy she was that we had bought the shop, and the people we knew in common. It became clear she had no idea what was going on.
“Hold on,” I said. “We know someone else in common. And I think he wants to talk to you.” Confusion washed over her face. I yelled into the back, “Hey buddy, can you join me out here?”
Her boyfriend emerged, shaking, and though I don’t know whether he’d admit it, I noticed he was a bit teary-eyed. Everyone in the shop stopped what they were doing. Getting down on one knee, he told her how much he loved her and pulled out the ring. She was so happy, she couldn’t speak.
“Is that a yes?” I asked as she made excited sounds, her hands covering her mouth. She nodded her head YES! as he stood up, and the entire shop broke out into applause.
After the proposal, I met up with Jeff and our friends in front of the store for the parade, the guys holding the kids up on their shoulders as we all huddled together for warmth. A gorgeous new polar bear mascot danced along the parade route.
“When did they get him?” I yelled over the pulse of the drum line.
“This year!” John yelled back. “They’re calling him Ira.” I smiled. Ira was all around us.
* * *
Jeff had spent so much of the year away that when he was offered a job to do a TV show in LA, I wasn’t exactly happy.
“Babe, I spoke with the producers,” he told me. “They want you to come be on the show too. I told them the only way I’d do it is if they kept my family together.” It was thoughtful that he wanted me along for the ride. But you know what’s gross? Riding coattails. There wouldn’t be a lot for me to do. Over the course of the season I’d pop in every third episode and yell at Grace Gummer as some high-strung government agency bitch. And I’d get to work with Tyler Hilton for a third time. But it was clearly a bone the producers were throwing Jeff to get him to agree to take the role.
I was torn. We had so much on our plate with the farm and the shop. And though I was happily doing the work it took to get them up and running, I wasn’t getting paid for either of those jobs. The fact was, I’d barely worked for pay since we’d made the full-time move upstate. Doing an easy job could help us out financially. And then there was the fact that I most certainly couldn’t get pregnant with Jeff across the country.
At that point, I was starting to get a hair anxious that I wasn’t pregnant yet. Gus was our magical baby who had been created quickly and with no trouble as Jeffrey and I fell in love. It had been amazing. After he was born, I thought, Problem solved. I had a kid. I had the best, easiest labor of anyone I know. I believed that my body was meant to do this, and all the stuff I’d been told about having a hard time getting pregnant was bullshit.
But we were approaching a year of trying and . . . nothing.
So while I wasn’t super thrilled about it, the decision was made. We’d go to LA to shoot the show.
Jeff went out ahead of us. My character wouldn’t appear till later in the season anyway, so it gave me time to tie up loose ends and handle things at Samuel’s that needed immediate attention. Such as the sign.
The sign out front was a large wood square with burgundy checkerboard painted on. In black letters across the diagonal, it said SAMUEL’S. Andy, who owned a successful marketing firm in the city, pointed out the obvious. “It doesn’t say anywhere what we sell.” We decided as a group to elaborate on the name. “Samuel’s Sweet Shop” informed passersby that we were peddling sugar, and it had a nice ring to it.
We ended up leaving up the string of large Christmas lights, as they added much-needed brightness to the shop. But what we needed most was a logo that didn’t “look like a pizza box,” as Phoebe put it, and a new color scheme.
To tide us over, John and I decorated the place for Valentine’s Day. Winters can be notoriously slow for the small mom-and-pop shops in town, so we wanted to inject some excitement into Samuel’s.
“Let’s put a kissing booth in our window,” I said to John one day.
Stringing up hearts I’d made from wax paper and shavings from Gus’s crayons, we hung a banner across the top of our window that said KISSING BOOTH in big red hand-printed letters. I’d made it from a roll of freezer paper, laid out across my kitchen island. When Jeff was home, he and I took a photo in front of it. “You think you can get other people in town to do the same?” I asked John.
“Of course I can,” he answered. I liked his attitude. Soon, high school kids and couples from town were taking advantage of the photo op.
I went over to the shop one day and took photos from literally every angle—interior, exterior—because I wanted everything captured as it was. Then I came home and whited out all the burgundy and made copies. With Gus’s little set of paints, I painted in all the trim and floors and exterior architecture with various color schemes. Andy had wanted something a bit more yellow and happy. And the Rudds were partial to Americana red, white, and blue vibes. Scanning them and sending them out, I thought there was a clear winner. Using a warm yellow-tinged cream as our base color, and cherry red, with a vintage turquoise blue, that rendering of the shop popped. It had enough of what everyone wanted to be a nice compromise.
Gus and I got a house/puppy/alpaca sitter to keep an eye on things while we shuttled back and forth from LA. A week out there, three weeks at home, and so on and so forth until April. “Just stay for the month,” Jeff suggested. “Gus is in preschool. It’s gonna get so much harder to travel when he’s older.” He was right. Gus and I could explore things in LA that would rival what he was learning at preschool. We hit up the La Brea Tar Pits, the history museum, the Griffith Observatory, the Gene Autry museum. We spent Easter out in the desert of La Quinta where Jeff’s dad and stepmom lived.
Jeff and I liked working together. We liked knowing all the same people and comparing notes at the end of the day. I liked that he made everyone laugh, and he would tell me that he was proud of me for how I conducted myself on set. Things were going so well that we didn’t really have plans to go home. Sure, there was stuff I could be doing to prep the garden, but I’d lived in New York long enough to know that anything planted before May was just frost bait and destined to die.
Then, late one night in mid-April we got a frantic call from our house sitter. She was in tears. “Something’s wrong with Bisou! She’s having these seizures!”
Bisou Morgan had been with Jeff for eighteen years. She had been the runt of the litter, far too you
ng to be away from her mama when Jeff bought her out of a cardboard box off some grifter kids in Venice, California. She had seen him through failure and through success, through major relationships and solitude. She had been to almost every set he ever worked on. As much as I loved her, I knew this news was gut-wrenching for Jeff. What made it even harder was that the show still needed him in LA; he wouldn’t be able to easily get back home.
“I’ll go,” I told him. The next day, Gus, our babysitter Doris, and I were on a plane back to New York. Shout-out to Doris. Besides the baby nanny who helped us out the first few months of Gus’s life, I’d never had a nanny. But whenever I worked in LA, I called Doris, who was a young woman of nineteen when I met her. She took care of Gus during the first Christmas movie I did. From then on, any time a short job popped up, I looked forward to calling Doris. Years later, she knew what Bisou meant to us.
The next week at home, Doris minded Gus while I took Bisou to an endless series of vet appointments. After multiple vets and scans, we discovered that she had a huge tumor in her brain. She had been doing strange things for a while, like knocking down the trashcan and acting weird in her sleep. Jeff and I had just chalked such things up to her being eighteen years old, but they turned out to be symptoms of a much bigger problem.
For the next week, I’d get Gus ready for school in the morning and Doris would drive off with him; then I’d load Bisou—who was a hefty old gal—into the truck and head down to Yonkers for radiation treatments. In the waiting room, I’d hold her in my lap and just cry. She was so good. And gentle. And smart. She was the animal that taught me to really love animals. And how was I gonna know I was pregnant again without our sweet girl to let us know? She had known I was pregnant with Gus even before I knew. One day she had curled up at my feet and wouldn’t let Jeff come anywhere near me. He was flabbergasted.
“This is my girl. This is my dog.”
“Well, not anymore. Apparently, now she loves me.”
The radiation was a risky procedure, but Jeff was locked into professional obligations and I had to keep her alive. After multiple rounds of treatment, the doctor had great news. “The tumor has shrunk! This lady might very well live another eighteen years.”
Bijou seemed to be back to her old self. She was brighter and moving more easily. Jeff and I shared a collective sigh, and meanwhile, sweet Doris was able to enjoy seeing the East Coast for the first time. “What kind of tree is that?” she asked me one day. Looking over to where she was pointing, I answered, “A maple.”
“What are those pink things on it?”
It took me a moment to understand what she was asking. But Doris, who had lived her entire life in California surrounded by palms and succulents, had never seen a fully blooming spring before. She was asking about the tree buds.
“I love it!” she cried.
I loved sharing the farm with Doris. She had known our family through the various phases of our life—LA, cabin, and now Mischief Farm. Her enthusiasm meant a lot. Once everything settled down, though, Doris headed back to LA, and I set out to do my May planting.
* * *
On the Friday before Mother’s Day, I saw something was wrong with Bisou. It was a special day, the anniversary of the day I had met Jeff (and Bisou). After I’d taken Gus to school, I stopped in the house before heading off into the garden. I immediately saw something wasn’t right with Bisou. Her abdomen looked unnaturally large. She was having trouble moving again. Jeff was on a plane to the UK to do a convention, which meant he was unreachable. I loaded Bisou into the truck and raced over to the emergency clinic. They did a draw on her stomach. Internal bleeding.
I called the clinic in Yonkers, and they told me to come down right away, but there was nothing they could do either. After overcoming the brain tumor, Bisou’s organs were failing. “We can stabilize her by removing the blood in her stomach cavity, but it’s going to come back within forty-eight hours,” the vet told me.
Once Jeff had landed, I called him from the waiting room.
“What’s wrong?” he said, knowing that I make phone calls only when it’s important.
“Honey, you need to come home.”
Jeff did two full days’ worth of photos and autographs in one day, not wanting to disappoint the people who had traveled from all over to see him. Then he got on the earliest flight he could and arrived the morning of Mother’s Day. Bisou lay in our bed. Her eyes were tired. She weakly thumped her tail when she saw Jeff. Gus was so happy to see his dad, it was difficult to balance that happiness against the loss of our old lady. We grilled steak for her and fed her ice cream. And on that warm May day, we lay in the sunny grass and let her rub her face in the sea of dandelions.
Our vet came over in the afternoon. We wanted Gus to be present, to understand the gravity of life and also that death doesn’t have to be scary—it can be loving. We were all together, and Jeffrey cried and I cried and I watched as Gus made himself cry.
I reached over and said, “Awww, honey. You don’t have to do that.”
“But I want Dad to know how much I care.”
It was a very gentle goodbye. It was Gus’s most profound encounter with loss, since he’d been too little to understand when Ira had died a year before.
After, we went for a family walk just to get out of the house and clear our heads. We did a lap around the farm. Gus, in his four-year-old wisdom, said, “Hey, can we rename the dandelions Bisoulions?”
He had figured out a way to make it better. Walking with Gus through this experience showed me how exposing kids to rough stuff when they’re younger helps to strengthen their coping skills. They’re not blindsided by the pain and grief. They understand that adversity and death are just a part of the cycle.
That dog was magic.
* * *
Dandelion Wine
Ray Bradbury’s book Dandelion Wine is my favorite book of all time. I picked up my first copy in a tiny bookshop in the West Village when I was nineteen. I own first-edition copies and autographed copies. I keep multiple copies in my basement at all times to hand out at a moment’s notice and have gifted the book to more people than I can count. I own a wine label from Bradbury Vineyards signed by Ray himself. I possess glass paperweights with whole dandelion puffs encased inside, and I drink dandelion tea at least four times a week. All of this is to say, the sense memory that dandelions provide is dear to me.
For hundreds of years, these vibrant plants have been regarded as medicine, an elixir for the body and mind. Bradbury’s book is an homage to the small town he grew up in, a collection of short stories woven together through the eyes of two young brothers. That lifestyle is what I always wanted for my children and for my family. When I found Rhinebeck, I found the town I’d always pictured in my mind. So naturally, making my own dandelion wine was a priority when I moved to the farm.
Each spring our fields become a sea of golden flowers, signaling that winter’s spell has been broken. That’s the kind of magic you want to bottle up and save for a gray day. Now our family calls dandelions Bisoulions, and our concoction is a serum of love and family and earth and hope. It’s our spring ritual, collection day falling between Jeff’s birthday at the end of April and Mother’s Day in May. The recipe changes a bit from year to year. A touch more local honey. Lemons to remember that first night Jeff and I met. But it always tastes like sunshine and hard work.
Dandelion Wine
1 gallon yellow dandelion petals (pinch them out and remove all the green)
1 gallon water
2 oranges (zest and juice)
2 lemons (zest and juice)
1-inch piece of ginger root
Add-ins, to taste: Honey, golden raisins, rose petals, cinnamon, clove berries—anything that makes you think of summer!
3 pounds sugar
1 packet wine yeast (you can buy champagne yeast online)
Collect 1 gallon of petals from fully bloomed dandelions, pinching the petals out of the green sepals. (The greens hold mu
ch of the bitterness typically associated with dandelions.) Put the petals in an extra-large stainless steel stock pot. Bring water to a boil. Pour 1 gallon boiling water over the petals. Make sure all the petals are covered, put a large dish towel over the top, and let the mixture sit for three days. Stir once a day with a wooden spoon.
After three days, strain the water from the flowers. Lay out cheesecloth and scoop out a bunch of the soggy petal mix. Twist the cheesecloth up to squeeze all the excess liquid into the pot. Repeat until you have drained all the summertime magic from Every. Single. Petal.
I put the used-up petals into my garden at this point. Not sure they do any good, but it feels like good karma to return them from whence they came.
Add to the pot the orange and lemon zest and juice, ginger, and any other special add-in ingredients to make it your own. Then slowly add the sugar, stirring constantly as you bring the mixture to a low boil for 20 minutes. Let liquid cool to room temperature.
In a separate, small bowl, mix the yeast with ½ cup warm water. Let it sit for 5 minutes to proof. Stir the yeast mixture into the pot of dandelion liquid. Filter out any solids through a fine-mesh strainer as you distribute the wine mix into sterilized, airtight jars. Make sure to leave plenty of headroom in the jar so nothing bursts as it ferments!
You’ll see bubbles form in the jar as your wine ferments from six days to three weeks. Once the fermentation stops, filter the liquid through a cheesecloth-lined strainer as you pour it into sterilized glass bottles. Put a balloon over the top of each bottle to keep an eye on any further fermentation. If it remains deflated for more than twenty-four hours, the process is done. Cork the bottle. Let sit for six months, preferably somewhere cool and dark like a basement. Then, just as the chill of autumn starts creeping in, your reminder of warmer days is ready to keep you company.
The Rural Diaries Page 13