11
People who hire all these things done for them never know what they lose; for the homeliest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them.
—Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
A month and a half passed as we worked hard to negoti- ate and navigate the details to buy Samuel’s. During that time, Jeff was still down in Durango shooting the movie, and when he assured me that things were not nearly as dangerous as the interweb made it seem, Gus and I ventured down.
Durango looks like a town out of a Western movie, complete with a baroque cathedral and an old town prison that has been converted into a hotel, which is where the cast was staying. The tiny rooms used to be jail cells, and there were no better cellmates than my boys. Plus, Chad Michael Murray, my character Peyton’s husband from One Tree Hill, was staying right next door to Jeffrey. My two “husbands,” neither of them legal! Besides Chad, Jeff was working with a fun pack of guys that included Ray Liotta, Chris McDonald, and Bill Paxton, who became Jeff’s closest friend on the project.
The prison yard was now a courtyard with a pool that sat dead center in the hotel, with all of the cellblocks overlooking it. All the dudes hung out there when they weren’t filming. Bill would bring down his huge hardback copy of his character Sam Houston’s biography and excitedly spout off fun facts about the legend. Bill loved his work. His energy was contagious. Gus called him Uncle Bill and reveled in the attention of these rough and rowdy guys.
One day by the pool, the guys were raving about Gus, and out of nowhere, Jeff announced in front of all of them that we were trying to have another kid. We’d been busy with settling into Mischief Farm and buying Samuel’s so hadn’t talked further about having another baby. It was news to me that he was on board, but I’d take that news any way I could get it!
Bill was also on board with this plan and cried out, “All right man! We’ll watch Gus. Go make it happen now!” It was mildly mortifying.
* * *
Gus and I returned home, and Samuel’s stayed open by the skin of its teeth. By August it seemed like the deal was going to go through, and come hell or high water I was going to make it work. I lived by the philosophy that if you act like something’s going to go wrong, it will go wrong. If, however, you act like it’s going to go right, it will go right. I could hear my dad’s voice saying the “want-to” creates the “how-to.”
I took it as a sign when I woke up to a text from our groundskeeper Awesome early one morning.
There’s more cows.
Now ol’ Ed Hackett and I had become quite fond of each other by that point. When you get past the rough exterior, you realize Ed is just a guy who really loves his wife, Barb, and their kids and cares a heck of a lot about his community. When he saw how much money we were wasting on tractor gas to mow all our fields, he said, “Why don’t you dummies just let me put some cows in those fields? They’ll handle your grass.” Genius. We’ve been boarding his dairy cows ever since. So when Awesome said there were more cows, I just thought Ed or his son Ed Junior had gotten a jump on the day and dropped more cows off at the crack of dawn.
I texted Awesome back.
Okay, great.
Quickly he responded.
BABY!
Baby?! We had a pregnant cow? Still in my pajamas, I threw on boots and raced down to the front pasture in the Rhino. Sure enough, the big chubby cow I thought had just been super lazy in the August heat was not so chubby anymore and was standing guard over her five-minute-old baby. Baby cow hadn’t even stood up yet. He was still covered in gunk and his mama licked at him, loving him through the grooming. Gus was still asleep. Jeff was a world away. I’d been so lonely and unsure of things with the store, then this miracle happened on our farm and the whole world was right again.
I’ve always believed in signs from the universe. I was a kid who prayed for signs. I would walk to and from school, talking to myself and noticing odd occurrences and taking them as motivation. The flowers are up early—things are going to be great today. There’s a dead baby bird on the ground by the holly bush—I’m done for.
Privately, I was hoping the calf’s birth was a sign that I’d get pregnant again soon. Although with Jeff away and me ensconced in Samuel’s, it would have taken a whole lot more than a mere sign—it would have taken a goddamn miracle to conceive on the few days we were actually in the same place.
* * *
When Gus started school again in September, I created a new routine: drop kiddo off, head over to Samuel’s, do as much as I could to spruce up the place without making it seem like I was doing anything, as we hadn’t legally taken ownership yet, pick up kiddo, head back to farm, hurry out to garden to harvest our first crop of veggies, do rounds on the animals, collect eggs, feed child and dogs, bathe child, bedtime. And then after Gus fell asleep, I’d try to cram in all the paperwork and emails I’d ignored all day.
Whenever we took ownership of Samuel’s, I wanted the shop to be in good order and a reflection of the love and effort we were all putting into it. To get there, the shop needed a cleaning. A thorough cleaning. John was fanatical about the merchandise and making sure the shelves were dusted and arranged in a tidy fashion. But endless boxes were piled up, the ceiling leaked, the bathroom was in shambles, and there was a trashcan that hadn’t been moved in years. I started pulling everything out from its settled place and uncovered an avalanche of housekeeping. It was like stumbling into a fifteen-year-old boy’s room and opening the closet door to find all the hidden dirty laundry. Essentially, what Samuel’s needed was a mother. I brought cleaning supplies, snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, and got to work.
The rumor mill in Rhinebeck didn’t have to work very hard before word spread that a bunch of actors were buying the shop, and one of them was literally on her hands and knees scrubbing the shop from top to bottom. Locals started popping in just to see the spectacle of the teen-drama actress turned janitor. Some people had been grumbling about how these “city people” were going to come in and ruin what had been a good thing. And I get it. Ira was beloved, and the shop truly was a small-town treasure. I understand why people would be concerned about “outsiders” (and Hollywood outsiders, at that!) coming in and turning it into something else. Once we started sprucing the place up, however, John confided in me that people had commented on it to him, saying how they were changing their minds about the upcoming new ownership.
Once the cleaning mission was complete, one particular eyesore gnawed at me until I couldn’t take it anymore. All along the entire counter of the shop, plates of enticing baked goods were lined up. It would have been a feast for the eyes if not for the scratched-up and yellowing two-by-four-foot sheet of Plexiglas that was supposed to keep germy hands and faces away. It was the least enticing baked goods display on the planet.
We didn’t own the place yet; negotiations were dragging on and on. But if Samuel’s was ever going to be the cute boutique sweet shop it was destined to be, we had to get rid of that enormous sneeze guard.
Zucchini for the Win
Sometimes you just really need a win, an easy layup, a sure thing. During that first year at Mischief Farm, when I was desperately searching for signs that we’d made the right choice and everything was going to be okay, little things could make or break me. Success in the garden was the best of the best signs. And the zucchini in particular were glorious for my ego.
Honestly, it’s a pretty easy plant. The seeds are big and easy to manage. The plants aren’t fussy about water. And once you get them going, they churn out an absurd amount of food. The blossoms are the loveliest of delicacies, and by now we’ve all seen zucchini ribbons served as pasta, or baked with parmesan cheese, or turned into addictive zucchini bread. Zucchini is a gem with many talents.
I wanted to find a way to use the abundance of eggs our hens were laying with the heaping baskets of zucchini we gathered multiple times a week. Hence, this Mischief Farm take on the classic Eggs Benedict.
Zucchini Fritter Benedict (Vegetarian)
FOR THE FRITTERS
1 pound zucchini (about 2 medium/large around 12 inches long)
1 teaspoon + ½ teaspoon kosher or sea salt
2 eggs, beaten
Zest of one lemon
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
¼ cup chopped scallion
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon black pepper
Canola oil for pan
FOR THE SAUCE
½ cup crème fraîche
1½ tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1 teaspoon hot sauce
1 teaspoon lemon zest
Paprika
3 chives, chopped
FOR THE POACHED EGGS
4 fresh eggs
Rice vinegar
Salt
Trim ends of zucchini. Grate and place in fine-mesh colander; mix with 1 teaspoon salt and let sit for 10 minutes with colander draining over a bowl.
Meanwhile, make sauce. Mix crème fraîche with lemon juice, mustard, mayo, and hot sauce. Stir in zest and chives.
Squeeze out remaining liquid from zucchini using a clean dish towel. You should have around 2 cups of zucchini. Place in a mixing bowl and add beaten eggs, lemon zest, thyme, and scallion.
In a small bowl combine ½ teaspoon salt, flour, baking powder, and black pepper. Sprinkle over the zucchini mixture and combine.
Heat 2 tablespoons canola oil in a nonstick skillet over medium high heat.
Add 2-tablespoon scoops of batter into the pan and flatten with a spatula. Cook until golden brown, about 2 minutes; then flip and cook the other side until golden brown. Place in warming drawer or oven set at a low temperature.
To poach the eggs, boil water in a saucepan and then reduce to a simmer. Add rice vinegar and salt to water.
Crack eggs into a cup one at a time. Create a vortex with a whisk in the water and slip eggs, one at a time, into hot water. Cook for 4 minutes. Remove egg and let dry on paper towel.
Place a fritter on a plate and put a poached egg on top. Drizzle with sauce and sprinkle lightly with paprika and chopped chives.
ENJOY!!
I went over to HomeGoods across the Hudson River and bought every cake stand with a glass dome that they had. When we set them up in all their varying heights and colors, the salad bar vibe was gone, and our baked goods sparkled like gems in playful jewel boxes.
“Ira would have liked this,” John said. It made me sad to think about all the awesome things Ira would have done if he’d only had the capital. He had such a big imagination.
* * *
By the time October rolled around, Jeff was home again for a short visit and amazed by all the hard work we’d put in around the farm and the shop. All of the buildings on our property had been transformed with paint; our plantings had reached maturity; the sunflowers were ten feet tall; the garden was a machine of productivity; and the chickens were laying eggs at such a rate I couldn’t give them away fast enough. John Traver became my dealer of sorts. I’d keep him flush with eggs, and then he’d dole out extras to our bakers and friends who had done favors for the shop. On other occasions, I’d take a big shopping bag of egg crates to the preschool parking lot and thank the parents for supporting Samuel’s. In my experience, bottles of wine and fresh eggs are the two gifts people get most excited about.
Then, on top of everything, I decided on a whim to renovate the farm kitchen in the wee hours of the morning after I’d put Gus to sleep. I knew it was gonna be a while before we had time to fully renovate it, and with the garden going nuts as it was, I was spending a significant amount of time in that space. But I needed the kitchen to be bright and airy and tidy. Over the course of a week, I covered the dark green tile on the countertops and backsplash with a concrete kit. Lemme tell you something: concrete makes everything cooler. I was meticulous about sanding between each layer of concrete to get a smooth, polished finish. Once that was done, I sanded down the cabinets and painted them a bright, soft white. The kitchen immediately seemed bigger. I also planned a special touch for Jeffrey. Remember how much he loves red? I threw him a bone and painted the kitchen island red. It was, of course, the first thing he noticed when he got home, and as I had hoped, he loved it.
We spent Halloween together, going pumpkin picking with Andy, Phoebe, and the Rudds. The kids ran hay mazes together, and we all oohed over the donkeys and goats. But then Jeff was off again: “It’s a fun script; Robert De Niro is producing and acting in it.” I didn’t want him to leave again, but who am I to deny a man his opportunity to work with De Niro?
Jeff made it back just in time for Thanksgiving, which we spent with the Rudds again. Julie and Paul’s excitement about things is intoxicating, and while the kids wrestled and chased each other, we conspired over Samuel’s. We planned to get as many local artisans as we could, and someone mentioned checking out the chocolate festival across the river. We had fun dreaming of all we could do with the shop.
The day after Thanksgiving John and I created the Christmas display for the shop window. Ira had loved creating scenes and dioramas for that window. John showed me another photo album. “Check this out,” he said, flipping to a shot of the window, complete with an antique fireplace mantel, stockings, fake snow, and a slew of presents. It was exactly the kind of display that begged you to come on in.
A bar table ran the length of the window now, so doing anything quite that elaborate was out of the question. But if I could just make something colorful and shallow, we could slip it in between the table and glass. Much to Jeffrey’s dismay, this sent me into turbo craft mode. He’d worked so hard to get home, and there I was hiding out in the basement with a glue gun, some foam core, a razor knife, paints, and an array of gorgeous handmade paper I picked up from our new pal Doug at the Rhinebeck Artist’s Shop in town.
As we counted down the days until our ownership of the shop would become official, and also Christmas, I made an Advent calendar for the shop’s display. From the foam core I cut thin strips I made into a grid. To add a touch of whimsy, I added a snow-covered roof and chimney. Each box was lined with a different fabulous paper, and then the edges were gilded in gold. It was a delicate four-foot-high by three-foot-wide by two-inch-deep dollhouse of wonder. John and I carefully transported it over to the shop and put it in place, then scavenged the shop to find the perfect treats to fill up the cubes.
Every other shop in town was flocked with garland and tinsel and twinkly lights. Ira, God bless him, had always made Christmas in the shop seem sweet and magical and homespun. But now that I was the one going through boxes of decorations, it became very apparent that Samuel’s was in need of some upgrades. We cleaned out all the old stuff Ira had held on to. He saved everything: ribbon, magazines with ideas for the shop, props for window displays. One night, we found a stash of very old candy nutcrackers. John held one up and lovingly impersonated Ira saying, “You never know when you might need it again.” We smiled as we remembered our friend.
I ran out to Home Depot and went full Griswold, filling a shopping cart with large globe string lights and bright blue and red shiny garland. I found ornaments as big as my head and large magnets so we could hang them from our ceiling fans. Signs and Santas and mini-trees overflowed from the back of my SUV as I rolled back up to the shop. John, Vincent, and a few other teenagers pulled an all-nighter as we decorated the shop.
Since Andy, Phoebe, Julie, and Paul spent the week in the city where their kids were in school, their role in our new operation was to check out the layout and functionality of shops there and find exclusive products (Megpies were a Phoebe find and are now at Starbucks, but we had ’em first!). Then they’d come up every weekend and assess all the work John and I were doing. Our friends had gambled on Jeffrey’s whim, and so even though we still didn’t own Samuel’s, I wanted them to see the bright, shiny future that lay ahead of us.
The workload was nuts. We had to pack thousands of bags of candies for Sinterklaas and start filling hundreds of holiday mail-order boxes. Everyone in town who had been moved by Ira’s life called the shop wanting to send gift boxes, just as Jeffrey and I had done the year before. The store was still in massive debt and couldn’t afford to hire holiday help, so an army of volunteers made up of Ira’s friends marched in and rolled up their sleeves. Meredith, who has a bunch of kids to whom Ira was an uncle, came in practically every day and helped us bag candy, measuring the pieces out to a fraction of a gram, carefully placing a logo sticker on the front and a description label on the back, then tying a tidy bow at the top.
Our chocolate bark maker, Celeste, works at an accounting firm and has a little boy the same age as Gus. Ira was family to her, and as soon as she heard we needed help, she rallied. I have no idea how she works a full-time job, takes care of her family, and still finds time to make mountains of chocolate.
It was beautiful chaos. We packed into the tiny store a lot of women, a lot of boxes, a lot of caffeine and craft brown tissue paper, and a constellation of candy and customers. I could hear John talking to customers—praising Donna’s cookies, giving someone a sample of Celeste’s bark, asking one of our regulars, Heinz, about his family. Or asking the high schoolers about their teachers, whom John knew from his days as a student at Rhinebeck High. I smiled to myself, remembering how we’d been unsure whether John was up for the role. But now I could see that he truly was the Candy Man.
We worked way after dark and long after closing, Christmas music rollicking in the background. We listened to Ira’s playlist over and over during that week after Thanksgiving—songs he personally chose, burned onto a CD, and played on that monstrosity of a stereo perched atop the milk fridge. John took stock of everything around us. “Ira would have loved all this! I wish he could see it.”
“I know,” I said, feeling a little guilty. None of us had known the financial danger the shop had been in. Had Ira ever mentioned it, all these same volunteers would have shown up to help. We would have donated the decorations, solicited mail orders to help pay off the bills. It would have been a very different story for our friend. The idea of his carrying that burden with only young John to confide in made me very sad.
Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” came on and the group fell quiet. It’s funny how you can hear a song your whole life and it’s just words and music. And then one day that same song can take on a whole new meaning and knock the breath out of you. “Blue Christmas” is Ira’s song now.
In a flurry of activity, we finally got a closing date. Andy called with the news. “Hil, can you go to the signing as our representative tomorrow?” It was scheduled for 5 p.m., just a couple of short days before the biggest weekend of the year in Rhinebeck—Sinterklaas.
I was on pins and needles. Andy had taught me so much about business over the previous six months. He’d been well-versed and thoughtful about all the financial decisions we’d made as a group. His asking me to go to the signing felt like a show of confidence. I was leaving my teen-drama cocoon and emerging a business-lady butterfly.
All that time during negotiations we hadn’t been able to talk about what we were up to because it wasn’t a done deal yet. But these were my friends and neighbors; I couldn’t contain my excitement. The morning of the signing I sent Gus’s preschool teacher Ms. Patty a letter. The kids had a field trip to the hospital the next day, and I was signed up to chaperone. “Signing the paperwork on our ownership of Samuel’s tonight! If you could pass along to the other parent chaperones that they are all welcome to come in, I’d love to treat them to coffee.”
I picked Gus up at school, dropped him off with Jeffrey at home, got good-luck kisses from my boys, and then put on my big girl business blazer and headed into town for the meeting. The law office was just down the street from the shop. I met our lawyer, John Marvin, over there as well as Ira’s husband, also named John, and his legal team. Sitting down at a long, shiny conference table, there was certainly an element of awkwardness. Everyone wanted to claim Ira, and ownership over the shop had been a tug-of-war between friends and family and John-the-husband. But then, John-the-husband pulled out a gift bag from under the table.
“I just thought you should have this,” he said to me. Inside was Ira’s teddy bear, the one he had used in the Sinterklaas pageant every year. I stroked the bear’s soft fur and smiled.
“This means a lot to me, John.”
The meeting was long. Technical. Arduous. But we had done it. Samuel’s was ours.
The moment it was over I raced to Rhinebeck Wine and Liquor right across the street from Samuel’s. The store was bustling with holiday activity. The owners of the shop are Joe and Kim Curthoys, parents to one of Gus’s classmates. “Good news?” they asked as they rang up a bottle of champagne.
“Great news!” It was so nice to finally say out loud that we had bought the shop.
“Well, let’s make sure we give you the local merchant discount.” I grinned and waved goodbye, and then raced across the street.
John Traver met me out front. “Is it a done deal?”
Holding up the bottle, I squealed, “We gotta take a picture!”
The next day the real work began. To my delight, all the parents from school showed up in support: Tara, whom I always parked next to and gossiped with in the back of the parking lot; Piper, whose family owned several buildings in town; Allison, who taught yoga; Hallie, who always wore a megawatt smile; Joe, the dad of one of Gus’s buddies; and countless other parents. To go from living in a place where your neighbor doesn’t recognize you after five years to this? It justified every decision Jeffrey and I had made. It confirmed that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Our group of friends-now-business-partners had been emailing like mad about all sorts of details—new products, store hours, revenue, giveaways for the festival that weekend. I sent out an email. We all had big ideas about how to make this the best Sinterklaas ever. But real life was full of practicalities.
Thu, Dec 4, 2014, 4:28 PM
Hi guys!
So before I get into a store update, I just gotta throw this out there. I don’t want to be Buzzkill Burton, but I feel pretty strongly that all the “new stuff” needs to wait until after Sinterklaas.
The logistics of just standard operating on such a big day are hard enough as is. We have JT and two employees working that day, and it’s their first Sinterklaas Festival in the shop. It’s tight quarters. Our counter space is nonexistent. And the free samples that are already planned are for items like bark and the locally made candy canes.
I know everyone is excited, but we’re in “stabilization” mode right now. I think the best thing we can do as new owners is just be around, maybe in shifts. Every day, folks have been coming in asking about the ownership, and starting yesterday we could finally tell them. It’s been a warm response, and all people wanna do is shake hands and say congrats.
I was just telling Jeff that we had a really wonderful interaction today. A man named Blair came in and asked what was going on. I explained our group to him and how we are preserving Ira’s life’s work, and he told me he was a good friend of Ira’s. He had been in the shop two days before Ira passed, and had not been back since. It was too hard. But he was so lovely and thanked us and said he was happy to be a customer again, knowing the store was being loved.
Okay, on to store business . . .
Today was an education in the shop. I’ve inventoried 95 percent of the product on our shelves, learned prices, organized some software that allows for a quick search of prices. JT is excited about that.
Most everything is bagged and priced. Mail-order packages are being assembled and the first ones go out tomorrow. Our FedEx account has been reinstated.
Ira’s mom called. She had no idea what has been going on. JT told her about us and she cried. She’s very happy her boy is being honored.
Today doing inventory I asked if they were called gummie fish or Swedish fish, and they said we should call them Paul’s fish since he buys them a lot. Cute.
I have to go back tomorrow. Let me know if there is anything you want me to look into while I’m there, but Oh My God! We can finally celebrate. And at Sinterklaas no less!!! A few minutes before the parade, they call out “last call” for hot chocolate and push everyone out of the store so we can all watch the parade together. Then they head back in a few minutes before the finale to get started again and stay open till 10 p.m.
Dinner tomorrow would be great.
xoxoxox
h
Sinterklaas had taken on an entirely new meaning to all of us now that we were store owners. Andy showed up early in the morning and hobnobbed with customers until it was time to judge the teddy bear contest. Along with John, they did their best to fill Ira’s shoes and gifted every kid with a certificate and chocolate bear. Andy and Phoebe had a knack for communicating with the clientele on the weekends, creating casual conversation to get feedback that would inform our direction in the shop. The Rudds took the afternoon shift, shaking hands and being the outgoing, warm people that they are.
I was on evening shift. In our months working together, John and I had taken on the subconscious habit of dressing alike. Decked out in our matching plaid shirts, we stirred hot chocolate by the gallon, shared the good news of ownership with all who came in, and plotted the special event that was going to take place in the shop later that evening. A few weeks before, John had pulled me aside. “Hilarie, I got a call today from a lady in town. Her daughter was a really big One Tree Hill fan.” He paused for a second, looking a little sheepish. “Well, her daughter’s boyfriend wants to propose to her during Sinterklaas at the candy store, and she wondered whether you could be there.” I could see how much he hated asking, but I was more than happy to do the favor for him. And now tonight was the night!
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 young 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 much 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.
Jeff headed back to LA, and the producers asked whether I’d come back as well, but my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t stand the fact that things had gone sideways with Bisou while I was gone. This farm? The shop? I had made a commitment to them. So while Jeff wrapped up the season, I put on my hardware-store pants and got back to work.
Samuel’s had no idea what hit it. I painted everything. I painted the bathroom pink and made it very feminine, because I find that it’s harder to leave things dirty if they’re super girly looking. One of the high school kid employees took one look and quibbled, “What the hell is this?”
“It’s a little reminder to put the seat down,” I teased. John laughed.
We needed a better display for our coffee. Andy and Phoebe and Julie had scoured every roaster in the city. It was important to us that we use a New York company, and it had to have the best coffee ever. They settled on Toby’s Estate, and the Toby’s people were wonderful, coming up to the shop to train our staff on how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Mechanics fixed all of our equipment, so we were firing on all pistons. Now we needed that coffee set up in a way that felt special. Naturally, I headed straight over to Hoffman’s Barn Sale to see John’s folks.
“Whatcha looking for today?” Roger asked.
“Oh hell, I don’t ever really know until I see it. You got any tables?”
Sure enough, Roger had two pedestal tables, perfect for the sitting area toward the front of the shop. And then I found a perfect 1950s enamel-top table with curvy chrome legs and a cream-colored enamel with delicate red scrolling details. I loved the idea of our coffee looking like it was set up in Grandma’s house. We wanted our customers to feel at home, and even with our new, brighter color scheme, the design fell in line with the original rustic environment Ira had cultivated. “I’ll take ’em all!”
I painted the pedestal tables our vintage blue color, and Gus helped me add touches of cream and red. Just as spring was blooming, Samuel’s was waking up with bursts of color.
The shelf that runs along the top of the store with Ira’s collected memorabilia was always a feast for the eyes. We wanted to add some of our own things to the collection. Andy offered his old tin Welcome Back, Kotter and Dukes of Hazzard lunchboxes. One day Kim Curthoys from the liquor store across the street came in with her old lunchboxes. “I’d like to add this to the collection and be part of it,” she told us.
Just like that, Samuel’s became a quilt that we all added on to. People were willing to try new things to help. We had our morning coffee people and our afternoon coffee people, so a caterer in town started making wraps and sandwiches, allowing us to capture the lunch crowd. We enlisted someone else to make fresh juices. Donna, our retired postmaster, began baking a couple dozen cookies every week. She’s so talented that when we started promoting her cookies, we needed hundreds and hundreds of them. So she went from baking as a retirement hobby to a full-time gig. My favorite are her artist cookie packs. They have two cookie sections: one with cookies covered in white royal icing with the black outline of a shape to color (I love the butterflies), and the other with cookies having a rectangle of the same royal icing but with dollops of food coloring that act like watercolor paints. We sold the cookies with little paintbrushes that you could dip in water and use to decorate your own cookie. The kids loved it.
I soon got a crash course in local rules and protocol. The building manager, Bill, had done a gorgeous job of painting the shop with our new cheerful color scheme. But out front sat a beleaguered bench, unpainted for years and a bit rickety, like a shipwreck parked in front of our plate-glass window. I picked up a pint of our red color, tightened all the bench’s bolts, and set about putting lipstick on that pig. Everyone walking by commented on how nice Samuel’s was looking. The happy red bench was literally the cherry on top.
The next day when I came into the shop, John said, “Hil, there’s an issue.”
It turns out you can’t paint just whatever you want, whenever you want to. The town claimed the bench was their property. “But they weren’t taking care of it!” I argued.
“They’re going to send the mayor over to take a look at everything. See what we can and can’t do.”
The mayor? I freaked out. Was I in a lot of trouble?
Heath, the mayor at the time, came over the next day. “It looks great!” he said, surveying all the work we’d done.
“I’m sorry about the bench,” I offered up. “I had no idea it was the town’s responsibility and not ours. It was just in such bad shape. But if you guys want to put a new bench there . . .” I didn’t even finish.
“The bench is fine,” Heath said. “You’re doing a good thing. Let me know if you need any help.”
Huh. That was easy. Too easy. But it prompted a crash course in local protocol. I learned that every sign has to be approved, you can’t place new seating on the sidewalks, nighttime lighting must be uncolored light and must come from a historically appropriate fixture. And on and on. I knew I was bound to mess up again, but at least I had the mayor on my team. So next time, when I inadvertently planted flowers where I shouldn’t have, the town gently told me to ease up, and let it slide.
Planting those flowers, I made a new friend, Mari Bird, an interior designer who had been very good friends with Ira. After he passed, Janice moved her antique shop, which had been next door to Samuel’s, to another location, and Mari took over the next-door space and opened a beautiful boutique that sells resort wear. We planted flowers outside the shops together, and Mari would come over and keep me company while I painted Samuel’s. As Mari and I started sprucing up our storefronts, we watched as a couple doors down another business got a fresh paint job. The beautification bug was contagious.
Another beautification project of mine didn’t go so well. We have a tiny median between the side of our building and the driveway that leads into the CVS parking lot, so I asked the CVS manager whether it would be okay to put in a garden and some benches so our customers could sit outside when the weather was nice. “Sure, do whatever you want,” he said. “We don’t maintain it.” But no sooner had I started digging than the owners of the property sent us a cease-and-desist letter. I offered to buy this piece of land from them, or even rent it. They refused every offer point blank. Then, I discovered that twenty years back, Ira had opposed the building of the CVS because he believed in the mom-and-pop way of doing things. In fact, a little pharmacy in town had ended up going out of business once CVS opened.
You win some, you lose some.
I gave up and went to see Pam and Roger at Hoffman’s Barn Sale, where I found a big old door and hung pots with colorful flowers cascading out of its windows. If we mounted it to the side of our building, then technically it wasn’t on the median and I could skirt around the cease and desist. As I was painting and gardening, a small group of old men watched me from across the street where they sat perched in front of Bread Alone. They didn’t say anything to me, just looked on, I imagine a little skeptically. Then one afternoon when I was almost done, they wandered over and a bearded man told me, “Looks good, kid.”
When I was done I hung a little sign that reads: THE IRA GUTNER MEMORIAL GARDEN.