The Rural Diaries

by Hilarie Burton

  * * *

  Jeffrey was home for only short bursts of time. When he was, I wanted everything to be pleasant and fun. I never raised any issues. I didn’t talk about going back to work, or Gus’s doctor appointments, or anything hard that was going on in our lives. Then, when he was away, I would text him and bring up all the issues. It was a frustrating cycle complicated by the fact that as new parents and a new couple, clearly we needed to address some things.

  I felt like Jeff was scared to be alone with me. Sometimes I was afraid he just wasn’t that into me. We’d known each other for only a year. Even when he wasn’t working, he busied himself at home. Or he’d tell me, “Hey, I’ve got to take a meeting.” I knew he didn’t have a meeting. He just wanted to get on his motorcycle and go for a ride. He hadn’t lived with a woman for a long time, and I’m a handful. That’s not a mystery to me.

  I realized I was putting a dumb amount of pressure on this man. He couldn’t be my whole wide world. I had to make a life of my own. But here’s the deal: I was the first of my friends to have a baby, and everyone else still wanted to have dinner in sexy, dimly lit places at 9 p.m. But by 6 p.m. each day I was catatonic. Trolling the neighborhood for other moms didn’t help much either. I’d push Gus’s stroller around the neighborhood and occasionally see other people, but they’d have ear buds in and sunglasses on and a stony look on their faces. It wasn’t like in North Carolina where everyone says hello to each other.

  So when Gus was three months old I booked a job on White Collar and rented a two-bedroom, furnished apartment in New York City from people who would be in Martha’s Vineyard for the summer. Jeff was going to come be with us once he wrapped the movie he was shooting, and his parents planned to visit at the end of June.

  When I showed up in New York, I discovered that the apartment was blanketed in cat fur and the family’s stuff was piled up all over the place. Since Jeffrey is massively allergic to cats, I knew I had to remedy the situation, and I had to do it in a couple of days with an infant. I bought a vacuum cleaner and went to town, but the fur had colonized the furniture, so I bought fabric to cover the couches and chairs just to have a place where I could put Gus down.

  On top of everything, the apartment was sweltering. When Jeff arrived, I was in poor shape. It was the day before my birthday, and Jeff popped his head into the bedroom and announced, “Hil, I’m going to go run an errand.”

  “What?”

  My eyes must have turned into carving knives because he quickly said, “I have to go find you a present.”

  Maybe I should have been grateful, but I didn’t want him to leave. I felt like I hadn’t seen him since Gus’s birth. The movie he had just wrapped up had been about a horrific subject, so he was acting withdrawn and sad. Even when we were together, I had no idea how to reach him. I didn’t want some thing, I just wanted him to be with us. I wanted him to have missed me while we were apart and to have daydreamed about what we’d do when we were finally back in the city together. It was exactly one year since that faint pink pregnancy test line had showed up in our lives. I wanted to feel like our relationship had grown deeper.

  “I don’t want a present,” I told him. “Let’s just do something together.” But off he went.

  Jeff’s parents were visiting, and so I spent the day with them. They knew I was disappointed, although I tried to be upbeat. Hours later, Jeff returned. I pretended everything was fine.

  The next morning his parents were flying back home and we were under a time crunch, so I had to open presents immediately. In my family, birthdays are a whole-day-long affair, and presents are the very last thing you get into. The grand finale, if you will. Here I was, barely into my first cup of coffee, and it was go go go. Grinning, Jeff handed me a box, wrapped by someone else in creamy white paper.

  Inside was a small, black box. When I snapped back the top, I saw a white gold watch with diamonds glittering all over the band. A mother of pearl face mooned at me. It was very feminine and pretty, but it wasn’t me. Not even a little.

  The room felt small. The air conditioning was insufficient against the swampy summer day. I wanted to go for a walk by myself. I wanted to weep. I wanted to scream. I’d had a baby with a stranger who didn’t know me at all.

  I choked out a thank you.

  Jeffrey’s parents left to catch their plane, and instead of talking to Jeffrey about it, I spent the day stewing, hormones a-raging. This motherfucker doesn’t know anything about me. He’s just buying me a shiny thing to try to distract me because he doesn’t like who I really am.

  I was crushed that he couldn’t find something that had meaning, like the gift he’d given me in New Mexico. I come from a family of makers. We craft each other long-thought-out gifts. My dad makes hand-planed cutting boards from wood he’s chopped himself. My mother makes beautiful scrapbooks of our childhood for us kids to take into adulthood. My brother John wrote Gus a book of fairy tales, complete with a handmade shield and sword. Conrad does photography projects. Billy made me paintings.

  Jeff asked me what was wrong, and I snapped, “You bought me a watch Jeffrey. I don’t even wear a watch.”

  Hurt, he replied, “I just wanted you to have a nice thing.” He wanted me to have a nice thing. That’s all. I cringe now thinking of how hard I’d been on him for something so stupid. But in the moment I couldn’t apologize or say thank you and mean it. I wanted him to understand that I didn’t want shiny jewelry and expensive things. I didn’t want us to be superficial or material. There was a part of him that he hadn’t fully explored yet, and that is what I wanted. I’d caught a glimpse of it when we’d first gotten together, driving around looking for buffalo in the desert. The rancher. The dreamer. The man who put Christmas lights on everything. But I didn’t say any of that.

  He stormed out of the house, went for a walk with the dogs, and didn’t come back until four in the morning.

  A week later he left to start another movie in Kerhonkson, New York.

  * * *

  I was working on White Collar and Jeff was two and a half hours from the city, but he might as well have been across the country. We weren’t on the same page at all. Our communication had dwindled to simple text exchanges.

  Me: Did you get to the cabin OK?

  Jeffrey: Yes. No traffic.

  Me: OK, good. Talk to you later.

  The future became a haze, impossible to visualize. We didn’t have a place that felt like home. We hadn’t planned past the getting pregnant phase. Under that big New Mexico sky, our life had been beautifully mapped out. It all seemed so tangible and absolute. The heartbreak of realizing that maybe we’d been wrong and there wouldn’t be a ranch or a shop or a Christmas tree farm was creeping in. We had no idea how we were going to do any of that while Jeff had to work. The fantasy had worn thin.

  To make matters worse, he was having a hell of a time on the movie learning to play guitar and sing. A perfectionist, he got incredibly frustrated that it wasn’t coming easily. And he had to do it in front of an entire festival of people. He was really intimidated by it, and some of that angst got displaced on me.

  One night on the phone he barked, “Well, if you guys were here, I wouldn’t be so stressed out.”

  I’d like to tell you I hopped in a car and rushed to his side without a thought, but that would be a lie. I called my manager, Meg, to unload, but she wasn’t having it. “Hilarie, you are a grownup sweetie. You are a mother. I know you know how to rent a car. Rent a car and go out there.”

  Meg Mortimer has flaming red hair, talks very fast, and is all New York. She partied at Studio 54. She’s been married a couple of times. She loves theater and art and fun. The embodiment of fabulous, she has lived in a way that gives her an expertise in life and love. “But, but, but,” I protested.

  “Hilarie, do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy? Go.”

  I packed up the baby swing, dismantled the crib, rented a car, printed out directions, put four-month-old Gus in his car seat,
and listened to him scream for two hours while I asked myself over and over, “What am I doing?”

  I arrived at a tiny A-frame cabin Jeff had rented that was nestled in a lush stand of red oaks and sycamores. We were in the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors to be seen anywhere.

  Jeff raced out into the driveway to greet us. The awkwardness that had plagued us during those back-and-forth months melted away. He was softer out there in the chirpy, dim woods. The cabin was rustic and spare, decidedly different from the hot, cluttered city apartment. There weren’t any bedrooms, but there was a small loft. It was so quiet and smelled like where I grew up, like grass and tomatoes and dirt.

  Twilight was blanketing the sky, and Jeff led us out into the backyard. The dogs had been miserable in the city, cooped up and leashed. But here, Bisou and our new puppy, Bandit, rolled in deer dung, darted into the woods, chased squirrels, and gleefully ran free.

  I picked a bunch of wildflowers and put them in a glass Coca-Cola bottle Jeff had left on the counter. As I set the flowers on the table, Jeff noticed and nodded. “That’s better,” he said. That tiny moment—his seeing me trying to make things beautiful and valuing it—imprinted on my heart.

  I woke up early, encouraged by the easy sunrise, and made Jeff a pot of coffee.

  “You guys wanna come to set today?” He wanted us there.

  I spent lazy days plopping Gus in his baby carrier and going on long walks. I’d pick Queen Anne’s lace, discover little roads and hidden cabins, and visit a farmers’ market with meat and vegetables from the neighboring farms.

  On one of Jeff’s days off I asked him whether he wanted to join me and Gus. He did. It was the closest thing we’d had to a date in ages.

  Down the road sat a fabulous white cabin. We’d never seen anything like it before—part modern, part rustic. It was art.

  “Let’s get a little closer,” he whispered.

  With two dogs and a baby, Jeff and I were not so stealthily creeping down the driveway when two men came out the front door. I was nervous. We were definitely trespassing, and someone walking out of a house with a shotgun wouldn’t be at all odd around there.

  “Hello,” they called out. No guns drawn.

  Jeff hollered back, “Oh. Sorry. Your house is beautiful. We were just admiring it.”

  “Come on inside.” Just like that, they opened their home to us. In my brain I ran through all the Dateline episodes I’d devoured in my lifetime and weighed the risk of following strangers. If they were killers, they were chic as hell. Jeff and I looked at each other and then said, “Okay.”

  One of the men was an artist from Central America, and the house had fabulous bursts of color and paintings from the floor up to the huge vaulted ceilings.

  We told the couple all about our time in New Mexico and having Gus. They told us all about their lives and then fed us, total strangers who’d invaded their home, heaping bowls of paella, which they had just made.

  As we left, hours later, with a huge Tupperware container of leftovers, they said, “You guys are going to love it here.”

  The fantasy was back.

  * * *

  As I packed to go back to the city, Jeff called out, “Real quick, before you go, I found this cabin online last night. It’s in Rhinebeck. You wanna go see it?” I didn’t really think it would come to anything, but we were back in the land of possibility.

  “Sure babe.”

  “Oh good. I already called the agent.” Somebody was excited.

  Coffee

  When I was a kid, drinking coffee was the most adult, cool, sophisticated thing you could do. My parents drank it all day long, and still do. During the holidays, when we’re all together, it isn’t unheard-of for them to make a fresh pot at 9 p.m.

  The second I moved out of the house when I turned eighteen, I splurged what little money I had on good coffee from fancy gourmet shops in New York City. We worked such odd hours on One Tree Hill that my parents’ twenty-four-hour coffee habit took hold of me as though part of my DNA. It became my routine, my moment of solace. Making coffee exactly to one’s own taste is an incredibly personal ritual.

  It can also be a powerful way to say “I love you.” Noticing how someone takes their coffee and making it just right is as foxy as it gets. Before I’d met Jeffrey, my hairdresser, Jojo—a southern powerhouse of a woman—taught me some love magic. “Sprinkle some cinnamon in the grounds before you brew the coffee. Gives it warmth. It’ll make a man cuckoo in love with you.”

  She was not wrong.

  I loved getting up before sunrise and making Jeffrey coffee before work each morning, never letting on that I’d cast a love spell on his caffeine.

  Now, with life at the farm, making the coffee is the one moment of calm before the day snowballs. I wake up before the kids, start the pot, deliver a cup to Jeffrey’s nightstand, and then feed George and Gus while nursing that first glorious cup. It’s when I make my lists and cuddle my kids, mentally preparing for whatever life is going to throw at us that day.

  * * *

  In a world where chaos abounds, making coffee is ceremonial and an act of self-care. Here are a few tips:

  If you wanna get real fancy, I highly suggest taking the time to use a French press. The coffee comes out richer and fuller bodied.

  If you suffer from allergies, try replacing sugar with local honey.

  What to do with all those coffee grounds? Put them in your garden. Not only do they repel pests like slugs, fruit flies, and mosquitos, they add nitrogen and improve drainage, aeration, and water retention in the soil. Coffee grounds are especially good for blueberries and azaleas, and you can use them to help keep your hydrangeas blue.

  Mix them with some coconut oil to make a body scrub that fights cellulite.

  And if you’re like Jeffrey, a little after-dinner nightcap of coffee and Baileys Irish Cream is the best way to settle in after a long day of chopping wood and generally being macho.

  * * *

  The truth was, I’d been searching since childhood for a place where I felt I fit in. I was that weird, loud kid with huge glasses, big frizzy hair, and teeth coming out in every direction. Beginning in third grade I insisted on wearing nothing but black every day, so I’m sure it isn’t surprising that I was the odd duck. That was the year I started doing theater at the local high school. Onstage, it didn’t matter that I was a strange little girl; I was a part of something beautiful and moving and fun. All I wanted was to be an actor and to get the hell out of Virginia. I wanted it so bad, in fact, that my entire senior year I talked with a fake New York accent. If you build it, it will come. And it did. I got a scholarship to Fordham College at Lincoln Center and began my new life as a big city lady. I never would have admitted it then, but now I can look back and see how much I longed for wide open spaces. In the city, I planted random bulbs in trays on my window sills, hungry for the green of my childhood.

  Then I got offered a role in a pilot called Ravens about a small-town basketball team. The show was narrated by the wise old coach as he explained the goings-on of the town to his dead wife. It was folksy and sweet and filmed in a town where my family had vacationed when I was a kid. Wilmington, North Carolina, felt a little bit like I was going home. After a few years of feeling boxed in, in New York City, I was happy to find the kind of town I’d grown up in, full of parades and tradition and community.

  But as Ravens became One Tree Hill, it was rebranded as a sexy show about teenagers with adult problems. I was in over my head, but it afforded me the ability to buy my first home, a Victorian built in 1880 with a tidy little front yard where I could plant a garden.

  As you know by now, the Paris dream of wandering along the Seine and taking in Versailles was not to be. And LA ate me up and spit me out. If Jeffrey was willing to try this new place in Rhinebeck on for size, why the hell not? At that point, I’d give any town a whirl. Perhaps it could be the place where I fit, the place I longed to find.

  That day, driving into Rhinebeck,
we both could tell something was happening.

  * * *

  After our stop at the candy store, we loaded back into the rented SUV and meandered out of town on the hunt for Jeff’s dream cabin. To get there, you cruise along the 9G, passing a postmodern Stonehenge—wonderful sculptures composed of huge boulders and stray car parts. Sheep grazed high atop a hill on the left. We turned onto West Pine Road, a shady street dotted with little ramblers and split-level homes like the ones I grew up in. The street dead-ended into a little cul-de-sac, backed by a stand of trees. I thought we’d taken a wrong turn until Jeff announced, “This is it,” as he eased the car onto a long gravel driveway bordered by tall wild grass and some big apple trees.

  It was quiet, and no one else was around. I was struck by the thought, He wants to be all alone with me. Jeff liked who I was at the Kerhonkson cabin, and I liked who I was there too.

  We rounded a curve in the driveway, and there was a Davy Crockett cabin. The frontiersman is something of a Burton family mascot. My dad is a Davy Crockett nut, so my brothers and I were Davy Crockett nuts. My mother used to rock me to sleep singing, “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee . . .” An autographed picture of Fess Parker hanging over our kitchen table was the pride and joy of our family. My dad never believed in marking up one’s body, but in his sixties he eased up, and my brother Billy and I went with him to get his first tattoo. We all got Davy Crockett artwork. Old Betsy, Crockett’s long rifle, runs the length of my ribs, pointed forward to ward off predators. It peeked out from behind the dress I was wearing the night I met Jeffrey. “Let me see what you got there,” he said, leaning in to examine the firearm as we stood in his living room. Then, without warning, he very lightly kissed it. Now, here we were standing in front of a Davy Crockett cabin. We didn’t even need to go inside.

  The realtor wasn’t there yet, so we hiked around the twelve wooded acres that surrounded the cabin. There’s a pretty steep hill in those woods that leads down to a reservoir. I scrambled down it, with Gus strapped to my chest and Jeff holding my hand, the three of us swaying from sapling to sapling. There were big outcroppings of stone, little clearings where I imagined us building a teepee, and Jeff was excited about cutting trails to ride around on with an ATV. The dogs ran with abandon.