3
I went looking for my dreams outside of myself and discovered, it’s not what the world holds for you, it’s what you bring to it.
—attributed to L. M. Montgomery
We wanted to have Thanksgiving at the cabin, but it needed so much work. I had tackled plenty of renovations on my home in Wilmington, but I had no idea about septic fields or propane gas or heating systems. Plus this time, I had a deadline, an infant, and was still working on White Collar while Jeff was working down in New Orleans.
In mid-November I flew into JFK with Gus on a Monday, rented a minivan, and thanked my lucky stars that my little brother John was coming to help. John had been in China for three years and was coming home for his first break since leaving. He’d never met Gus. Hell, he’d never even met Jeffrey. My brother and I did, however, have a family history of doing home renovation projects together.
When I was growing up, our first family project was stripping wallpaper in the house on Ithaca Road in Sterling Park. The family room wallpaper was horrible, tan with intricate brown drawings that looked like old advertisements from a turn-of-the-century newspaper. In the kitchen the wallpaper was printed with oppressively enormous grapes, oranges, and apples. My brothers and I had a ball trying to see who could pull the longest strips down.
Since then, we have whitewashed fences and built furniture and removed popcorn ceiling in various Burton properties. Conrad is the patient one. Billy is the organized one. And John is an ox. His help on the cabin was perfectly timed.
John landed at 6 a.m. Tuesday after a long overnight flight, took a train to meet me in midtown Manhattan, and we hit the ground running. Since there was no furniture at the cabin yet, we rented rooms across the Hudson River at an extended-stay chain hotel. Each morning, we’d run over to my beloved Home Depot, collect whatever materials we needed for the cabin’s transformation that day, and then with baby in tow, we’d drive across the river and down the shady road to our new little sanctuary.
Gus, thank God, was the easiest baby on the planet. I’d put him down on the one section of carpeted flooring in the dining room, and he’d play with Thomas the Train for hours. Or he’d coo in his swing, rocking back and forth while watching John and me dart all over the house. The previous homeowners had been meticulous in taking care of their home, and so our task was to merely brighten up the joint and bring it up to the twenty-first century.
We started in the main living space and spider-webbed out. We took off cabinet doors and sanded and primed every inch of that dark oppressive wood. John set up a door-painting station down in the basement so Gus wouldn’t crawl all over them. I’d always wanted to try one of those Rust-Oleum countertop refinishing kits. Who can resist that Cinderella transformation of turning pumpkin-orange Formica into a subtle, relaxing neutral? (I can hear all the hipsters out there lamenting that I didn’t preserve the garish original fixtures—How could you? My friends, it was easy!)
While cabinetry dried, we assembled a new crib and coordinated deliveries of a couch and new appliances. The propane guy gave me a newcomer lesson in fuel. We replaced sink fixtures and added new lighting to the intensely dark home.
Jeff has a thing about red bedrooms. For any of you One Tree Hill fans out there, you’ll recall that my character Peyton Sawyer did too. Even her record label was called Red Bedroom Records. So a couple gallons of Ben Moore later, our loft bedroom had gone from bland to cozy and a bit mysterious.
Since the house was so tiny, storage was massively important. There were virtually no closets, and so I commissioned a local furniture maker to create a one-of-a-kind bed with drawers underneath as a surprise for Jeffrey. As Thanksgiving approached, everyone was winding down, and I begged and begged them to deliver before the break. My experience living in Los Angeles had prepped me to get blown off, but instead, the furniture maker promised me he’d be there on Friday. That was perfect! Jeff was wrapping his movie in Louisiana and would be driving up to our new home on Sunday.
TVs were installed, curtains were hung, a storage container was delivered from North Carolina. My dad kindly packed up furniture from my Wilmington Victorian and things from his antique store and sent them up. Gus tumbled around in the empty boxes as we organized. Sheets. Dishes. Bookcases. The dining table and chairs.
By the time we finished up for the day on Thursday, we were exhausted. John and I had lived on a steady diet of Gatorade, granola bars, and Wendy’s. We treated ourselves that night to dinner at the Friendly’s next to the hotel. It was such a throwback to our childhood, getting hotdogs after Little League baseball games, that we couldn’t resist. I was happy working side by side with my brother again, plotting and planning and making shit happen. Eating our hot dogs that night, we were a bit smug. We had two and a half more days before Jeff showed up. We could afford to ease up a bit.
Friday morning, we took our time checking out of the hotel. We did one more Home Depot and Target run and then made our way to the cabin. The bed was due to arrive in the afternoon, so we unpacked and made lists of what still needed to be done.
My phone dinged with a text from Jeff.
Jeff: How’s it going?
Me: Super good. Can’t wait for you to get here.
Jeff: See you in 4 hours!
Wait, what?
Me: I thought you were still working. Didn’t think you were coming till Sunday!
Jeff: Got off early! Been driving all night. Love you!
Shit! “JOHN,” I hollered. “We gotta move!” Unpacked boxes full of odds and ends were stacked all over the place. The cabinet doors still lay drying in the basement. Tile for the kitchen backsplash was still in its packaging.
You know those design shows that are massively overproduced, where homeowners have to renovate within a certain amount of time? I don’t wanna brag, but John and I would be good at that. We put our heads down and turned that cabin into the cutest fucking thing you ever saw. We kicked out rugs. Tossed throw pillows. Hung pictures. Placed books. Filled the storage container with empty boxes and packaging materials and slammed the door shut—If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist!
At 3 p.m., the bed arrived! I tipped heavily and thanked the furniture maker profusely as I ushered him and his helpers out the door. We had one hour left. Gus still rocked in his swing, completely entertained by the chaos.
I threw up the tile on the backsplash while John reattached cabinet doors. We tossed the one Phillips head screwdriver we had back and forth as we attached hardware on the doors. The sound of gravel crunching in the driveway stopped us. “He’s here!”
John focused on the last three drawer handles, while I lit a scented candle, put sweet Gus on my hip, and breathlessly opened the front door. “Honey! So glad you’re here!”
Guys, I was beat. John was a zombie. But the look on Jeff’s face when he saw his dream cabin all put together was something I’ll always cherish. He walked from room to room, touching furniture and the new fridge and the curtains. “I love it,” he said earnestly. “I just love it.”
I was relieved. And Jeff’s appreciation to John was the beginning of a strong friendship. He continued to take in the new space. “Not sure what you were in such a tizzy about. There was hardly anything to do. Place looks great.”
John and I exchanged looks. We knew better.
Only one thing was left undone: we needed a new stove. The old stove was terrifying, to put it politely—and you can’t have Thanksgiving without a fully functioning stove. Jeff is a nutcase about Thanksgiving. He does all the cooking. He had been fantasizing about our first cabin holiday since the day we visited the property. But he couldn’t make his dream dinner on that stove. Multiple burners were inoperable. It made a scary clicking noise. And it was gas, making me fear the whole house would blow up if we used it.
I had ordered a stove that was scheduled to arrive days ahead of Thanksgiving. But then I got a call: “Orders are backed up because drivers are off for the holiday.” Two days before Thanksgiving, still no stove. I harangued the delivery company. I jumped every time I imagined I heard tires on the gravel driveway. John and I had been cooking everything in a shitty toaster oven, and I’d lie awake at night trying to figure out how I could possibly make Thanksgiving dinner in it.
The day before Thanksgiving I heard the truck rumbling down the driveway, and I started screaming, “The stove is here!” The three of us adults ran out like kids on Christmas morning. It was the end of the day, and ours was the last delivery. The two delivery guys maneuvered the stove into the kitchen and went to connect the unit to the propane tank. “Ma’am, you’re missing a piece.”
“Huh?”
“There’s a little safety valve. Connects the fuel source. Your old stove doesn’t have it. Pretty dangerous. We can’t connect the stove without it.” Jeff started asking a million questions. “What do you mean? Can’t you just hook it up anyway and we’ll risk it? Where can we get it?” The guys were shaking their heads. It was like they didn’t understand that the happiness of my entire family was resting upon this stove. Jeff already had a huge local turkey brining in the fridge.
“Best we can do is come back on Monday or Tuesday with the right part,” they said. I was frantically googling appliance supply stores in the Hudson Valley and jumped on the phone.
“You have the valve?” A mom-and-pop shop across the river in Saugerties had exactly what we were looking for. But they were closing in twenty minutes.
“Please! Please stay open for me! I’ll be there in nineteen minutes. Without it we won’t be able to have Thanksgiving,” I begged. There was a long pause.
“Okay. I’ll be here.”
I fixed my gaze on the delivery guys and said, “Look, please stay here. I’ll give you any amount of money to just stay here.”
“It’s fine. We’ll stick around. Go get that part.”
I couldn’t believe it. The store stayed open for me. The stove guys waited for me. Crossing the river in the dark, I was filled with gratitude. Just by asking people to be nice, they were nice. I wasn’t in LA anymore. I could feel myself settling in.
Jeffrey made coffee for the delivery crew and entertained them while I shuttled back and forth across the river, so incredibly in love with our new community.
The next day, Jeff rose early and got to work in the kitchen. We all took turns in the baby-size kitchen, chopping and prepping, doing dishes, setting the table. John and Gus wore matching cable knit sweaters and wrestled. I focused on the pies.
The sun set and we lay out all the food across the dining table. John had missed eating the typical American fare while in China, and Jeff hadn’t had a real meal the entire time he had been filming. There’s something about constantly moving in high gear—when you have the opportunity to stop, you almost don’t know how. But sitting down and saying grace for Thanksgiving, I took the moment in with great consciousness.
Dear God. Thank you for our family. Thank you for this new adventure. Thank you for this happiness. Please help us to pay it forward.
* * *
After Thanksgiving, John left, and Jeff, Gus, and I holed up in our cabin. Our biggest outings were to the candy store in Rhinebeck. Jeff learned that the elegant, curly-haired owner was Ira Gutner, and the store, Samuel’s, was named after his late uncle Samuel. Ira and Uncle Samuel had an affinity for going to Yankee games, and before every game they’d stop at a penny candy store right outside of the stadium. In those aisles of sugary delight, Ira’s uncle used candy to teach Ira everything he needed to know about the world of business. Ira grew up to become a successful entrepreneur in the fabric industry in Manhattan. He attributed all his success to those childhood lessons, and when he retired early and moved upstate, he opened up his own sweet shop and named it Samuel’s.
Samuel’s became a town headquarters for Jeff. He went there almost every day, under the guise of picking up something for me. Ira sold chocolate bark with sea salt and almonds and cranberries, and Jeff and I devoured it at an embarrassing speed. But Jeff also went there just to get coffee and talk to Ira—find out the gossip in town and what places to go and restaurants to try—and then he’d come home and share that information with me.
“There’s a salvage place in Red Hook. That young guy who works at the shop? His parents run it. Might try to pop in.” Or “Ira says we’ve got to try the French place in town—Le Petit Bistro. It ain’t Paris, but it’s supposed to be great.” Or “Ira’s gal that makes chocolate has a baby the same age as Gus and she wants to have a play date.” Oh, Ira—dressed in his plaid shirts or turtleneck sweaters or overalls when he was feeling particularly “country.” He was so invested in our happiness.
One of his first edicts was that we had to attend the Sinterklaas festival. A Christmas festival! I didn’t need to be persuaded.
The Dutch brought the legend of Santa Claus to America in the 1600s when they settled here. In the mid-1980s, celebration-artist Jeanne Fleming brought the Dutch tradition back to life with a children’s parade through the streets of Rhinebeck. Twenty years later, after much success as the director of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, Jeanne came back in 2008 with a bevy of artists and musicians and resurrected the festival with the help of an army of townspeople. Sinterklaas, based on St. Nicholas, rides through the main drag in Kingston, on the other side of the river, and then crosses the Hudson on a boat covered with Christmas lights. He arrives at the train station where the Rhinebeck children greet him, hooting and laughing loudly. Then they parade through town.
Ira invited us to be his guests, which meant we had use of the bench outside the sweet shop. A good thing too, because not five minutes after we parked on one of the side streets and made our way over to Market Street, the whole town had congregated. Everybody was holding glowing white star lanterns with Christmas lights glimmering through the holes. A pack of children carrying pine branches festooned with tinsel led the parade. The most beautiful Sinterklaas/Santa Claus followed with a long, snowy beard and bright robes of crushed red velvet. Then a wild puppet show swirled down the street. The puppets, which are two stories tall, careened along while all of us cheered and clapped.
Turkey Wars
The very first Thanksgiving Jeffrey and I had together, he came to North Carolina to celebrate the holiday with my family. They’d met only once before. I was mildly nervous. “I’ll make the turkey,” my mother said. She’d made the turkey my whole life.
“No, no,” Jeffrey replied. “I’ll be making the turkey.”
Good lord. It was like watching two alpha animals circle and size each other up before mauling one another. It was settled that they both would be making a turkey, and all our guests would vote on which was better. So Jeffrey and my mother went to town. Mom brined hers. Jeffrey went with injections for his. They jockeyed over oven space, and a copious amount of shit was talked.
But no one had considered what all the guests would be doing while this cook-off took place. Decades before, my preschool teacher Mrs. Allison had given my mother a recipe for “Witches Brew,” a hot harvest drink meant to warm up even the coldest of days. As kids, we were given the booze-free version of this sugary treat (Mrs. Allison was fond of adding a splash of whiskey to her brew), but as grownups, we discovered that it lived up to its name as an instigator of debauchery. Naturally, this particular Thanksgiving during the Turkey Wars, Witches Brew was readily available and a huge hit with our crowd.
Before the first course even started, the adults had dissolved into a mess of giggles and unruliness. My friend Nick had wanted to contribute, and so he labored for days over a butternut squash bisque. Everyone cackled as he tried to steady himself enough to ladle it out at each place setting. By the time the turkeys were presented for judgment, it was a lost cause. Jeff tried my mother’s. “It’s fabulous,” he admitted. My mother sampled his recipe. “Oh God, that’s good!” she exclaimed.
What had started off as a wildly stressful cage match became a love-fest of food, family, and friends. And I had the Witches Brew to thank.
Witches Brew
Keep in mind that this recipe is from the 1980s!
6 tea bags of your choice (I use a spice tea)
1 can frozen orange juice
1 can frozen lemonade
3 cinnamon sticks
1 tablespoon cloves
Grab the biggest pot in your kitchen and add 4 quarts of water. Bring to a slow boil and add the tea bags. Let steep for 7 minutes. Remove the tea bags and add the frozen juice, lemonade, cinnamon sticks, and cloves. Simmer on medium heat for at least 30 minutes. To serve, strain out the spices and ladle into a teacup. Splash in a healthy dose of whiskey to make it interesting.
Gus nestled up on Jeff’s shoulders, and we huddled together, limbs numb, chins and noses frozen and red. We had become dots in a sea of Christmas cheer—a part of something. The drums of the marching bands kept the entire town in rhythm, everyone dancing together to create warmth. Costumed marchers tossed candy to the kids perched on the curbs for a closer look. Alpacas and donkeys in elaborate South American harnesses pranced down the main drag like royalty.
We took Gus to his first Christmas Eve service at a handsome little chapel down the road. The elderly congregation oohed and aahed over our funny little boy, who clapped and sang “ba ba ba ba” during the hymns. Christmas Day was a tiny, intimate affair—just Jeffrey, Gus, and me. We taught him how to open presents for the first time, burning the wrapping in the roaring fire Jeff built.
In his red long underwear, purchased proudly from the Rhinebeck Department Store, Jeff opened his gift from me. A note in the box said “Go to the garage.” With the help of my dad, we’d gotten the local ATV dealer to stealthily deliver a Yamaha Rhino so Jeff could tear around the woods. Figuring that eventually we’d need to plow the incredibly long driveway, it was also a functional tool, as well as a ridiculously fun one. Jeff was like a little kid. Our quiet cul-de-sac was now filled with the roaring of the Rhino’s engine and Jeff’s whooping. “Be careful!” I called out.
He skidded to a stop. “You and Gus get dressed and get in here!”
Together we played all day like children. And the next day, as if on cue, it snowed twenty-four inches.
In February, Jeff was off to Canada to do a project and then stuck in LA doing press for a bit. I was working on White Collar when spring arrived. Sometimes on my day off I’d get a babysitter to stay in the city with Gus so I could drive to the cabin and mow the lawn or paint the shed for a few hours. Being up there and doing something with my hands calmed me. I felt entirely alone and peaceful. In Rhinebeck I was comfortable in my own skin. I could go to the hardware store with no makeup and wearing my dad’s old fatigues. And unlike in LA, I had people to say hello to.
Our neighbor, Farmer Mike, was a former firefighter and a great storyteller. He had lived right there in that tiny community forever, raising kids who had long since left the nest. He knew every person who lived on the street and knew who lived in their houses before they did. Mike’s wife, Marcia, made lovely paintings of all the lighthouses in the Hudson Valley. She invited us to tour her studio and gifted us with a painting that we hung in the cabin.
Mike hung NO TRESPASSING signs for us, and when we weren’t around, he chased off kids who snuck onto our property to ride their dirt bikes. He reminded me of my dad, always prepared for worst-case scenarios. Mike told us where to buy a huge shipping container to store supplies and how to live off the land. Once, our clothes dryer went haywire and started smoking. It wasn’t on fire, but we weren’t sure what to do, so we called the volunteer fire department and told them it wasn’t an emergency but it would be great if they could send someone out. Mike, who used to hang around listening to the scanner, arrived before the first fire truck showed up. Gus and I avoided the fray and sat in the car down the driveway. It must have been a slow day, because no fewer than five trucks showed up, from all different parts of the county. Mike was gladly on hand to greet and communicate with each one.
We learned from Mike that an entire family lived right along our road. Bob and his wife, Rachel, are lovely people about my age. Her parents lived two doors down from us, her older sister lived a few doors down from them, and her aunt and uncle lived just three houses down from them. Rachel grew up playing with the kids who lived in our house and knew our property better than I did. They had heard that I collected taxidermy, and when they came by to introduce themselves, Bob showed up with a fox pelt. The fox had been killed by a car, and as a taxidermist Bob recognized that it was too beautiful to just leave on the road, so he’d tended the hide and brought it to us as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift. I thought, These are my people.
Williams Lumber is a dynasty in the Hudson Valley, run by the patriarch, Stacy, and his children. That first year, Jeffrey and I were in the Rhinebeck location just about every day. We became familiar with the staff, and I’m pretty sure they laughed whenever we left.
“You all need anything else?” they’d ask as we checked out.
“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” we’d respond.
They knew everything about what we were working on—whether it was painting the hallway or tiling the bathroom. I quickly learned that in a small town, everybody knows your business. It becomes a town affair, and you just have to get comfortable with that. The anonymity of our days in LA and NYC was gone. Quickly, we felt like we were part of something.
The whole front yard was filled with brambles of wild roses. It was a gorgeous stronghold of thorns, ready to make a pincushion out of Gus, so Jeffrey and I pulled them all out. We cleared the area around the house of the brambles and saplings, and then we started experimenting with what would grow in our shady yard. The soil was totally different from the soil in North Carolina and California. We planted a couple of Christmas trees in the front yard because we knew that was the end game. Once we had our first spring and saw the apple and peach orchards, Jeff got excited about all the flowering trees. He missed his bougainvillea back in LA, so he went to the nursery and picked out one of every flowering tree that they had. “We’ll just plant them all and see what happens,” he said.
I got window boxes and painted them red to pop against the dark logs of the cabin. I mixed taller annuals like aster with more compact blooms, always adding a bit of creeping Jenny. That had been my secret-weapon plant down in North Carolina; it grew anywhere and came back year after year. But I learned they don’t call it that up north.
“Can you tell me where to find the creeping Jenny?” I inquired. It was as though I’d asked for the local peeping Tom. The raised eyebrows and tilted heads hinted that I’d made a mistake. “It’s like a vine, tiny roundish leaves . . . kind of neon green?”
“Oh, you mean the aurea?” Sure. Aurea. That’s what we’ll call it now.
The only open, sunlit space at the cabin was on top of the septic system. And I really didn’t want to grow food in a septic field. Instead, I planted forsythia, impatiens, and woodland flowers that grow well in rocky soil. Jeff and I actually got into a fight about the forsythia. As a West Coast boy, he had never seen it, and the neon yellow of the blossoms captivated him. Huge hedges of the flowering bushes lined the roads and sent up fireworks of flowers in front of the businesses in town. But I was dead set against them. My entire life my father had told us stories about his mother sending him to the forsythia bushes to pick out the switch she would whip him with. He hated them. Which meant I hated them. All Burtons hated them. Jeffrey brought five of them home anyway. Ugh, the betrayal. I had to admit though, they were striking.
I was becoming less Burton, more Morgan.
To help balance the two, I planted tulips and irises and all the bulbs that my mom and her Dutch family grew. Her bulbs were a sight to behold when I was growing up: crocuses, then daffodils, then tulips, and then the lilies of summer. It was a parade of grandeur.
Ira also sent us over to Hoffman’s Barn, a nondescript treasure trove hidden in the back of a movie theater parking lot. Roger and Pam Hoffman found the beauty in the bygone: an entire building full of old doors and windows; another building segmented into sections dedicated to china, bureaus, wingback chairs, hatchets, and kids’ toys; outside, rusted farm equipment, old logging saws, and various jewels in all shapes and forms. Roger came out and showed us around, and Pam, shy but warm, immediately made us feel at ease.
They both doted on Gus, explaining to him what the old tools and toys were. Gus was going through a massive John Henry phase. Roger ushered him over to a low shelf of hammers—sledgehammers, rubber mallets, framing hammers. It was the island of lost toys for freaks like us who like tools that come with a narrative. Roger selected a huge wooden mallet with scars and tiny chunks missing. That mallet had seen action. “For you, John Henry,” he said, handing the surprisingly light tool to Gus. There’s not a toy in the world that could have compared with that gift.
Everything I’ve ever needed I’ve found at Hoffman’s Barn. In the summer we bought some wooden half barrels and filled them with herbs. And when my birthday rolled around, Jeff went out to Hoffman’s and found an old tractor seat that he mounted and placed in a wooden frame he built himself. He had made me some “fart”—that’s “farm art.” The stark contrast between my previous birthday and this one, made up of crafts and time spent together, was balm for my heart. We had grown together as a couple, as a family. This was who we were meant to be—as individuals and artists and as a couple.
We kept the house in LA, but the truth is that once we were in the cabin with its shitty kitchen, weird linoleum floor, Technicolor bathrooms, leaky windows, and creaky front door, we never wanted to leave. On paper, the LA house was a great family house, but we didn’t feel like a family there. We felt like a family in the one-thousand-square-foot cabin.