The Magnolia Story(13)
There always seemed to be a candle burning, filling those shops with the delicious scents. It wasn’t unusual to see fresh flowers on the counter next to the cash register or for the shopkeeper to offer you a cup of coffee or tea while you browsed. There was something just wonderfully inviting and warm about those places that made me feel very connected in a city that could sometimes feel big and overwhelming.
I loved taking Chip to that great big city and showing him a side of me he hadn’t seen before. We acted like rich kids and stayed in a suite at the Drake Hotel, a high-end, first-class place on Park Avenue that had once played host to celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Lillian Gish. But that was just the starting point for our adventure.
We set aside a full two weeks for our honeymoon, and other than those couple of nights at the Drake, we made no plans whatsoever. We decided to rent a little car and just go wherever the day took us. We headed upstate and marveled as the massive city gave way so quickly to hills and rivers and fields full of flowers. Before long the tallest buildings around were the silos on old-fashioned farms that dotted the landscape.
Chip and I both had an affection for farms and old barns and silos, and we decided it would be fun to go explore. If we saw an abandoned barn, all gray and weathered and tipping over in some empty field, we’d stop and go walk around it, even duck inside just to see what was there. Occasionally we’d find old bottles and farm equipment, and I always wondered why someone had just up and abandoned them there for all those years.
The thing I found interesting was just how beautiful everything looked. The rust, the age, the weathering—maybe it was just because we were in love, but everything we saw in those old abandoned barns, both inside and out, seemed to capture and reflect the beauty of the land and the air and the early summer scents in that beautiful corner of the world. Even the dust in those old barns seemed to rise up on purpose, helping to illuminate those old forgotten spaces with streams of sunlight that crept through the cracks in the wood.
We didn’t have Google Maps in 2003, so we spent that honeymoon road trip following our intuition and heeding the attraction of little signs on the side of the road: “Antiques” or “Bed & Breakfast” or “Pick-Ur-Own!” We agreed that we would drive until we were both dead tired and then find someplace to lay our heads wherever we happened to wind up.
On the first night we ran into this place called the Mohonk Mountain House. We’d been driving along the cliffs of the Hudson River, and then all of a sudden this hotel made of stone rose up in front of our eyes. It looked just like some sort of medieval castle.
It was late, and we were exhausted from all of our exploring, and we both thought we’d died or something. “Is this place for real? Or did we just drive off that cliff to get here?” It was so weird just to cruise into some driveway and have no idea what to expect and then find a place like that.
We wandered into the lobby half expecting it to be our final resting place.
The good news is we weren’t dead, and when we told the nice people at the front desk that we were on our honeymoon, they put us up in a gorgeous penthouse suite for the price of a regular room.
People wound up giving us deals like that almost everywhere we went on that trip. It was incredible. And thank goodness, because we were already low on funds.
From there, we decided to continue up into New England, meandering across the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, cutting through the country roads of southern New Hampshire, and heading north to explore as much of the crashing Atlantic on the rocky Maine coast as we could. We stayed off the interstates and took back roads as much as possible, stopping at antiques stores and mom-and-pop shops and cute old barns and farmhouses—whatever caught our eye. One night we stayed in the dreamiest bed-and-breakfast right on a farm, where we ate fresh eggs and a home-cooked meal in the morning. Both of us agreed, “What could be better than that?”
Before I met Chip, I was basically a city girl—or maybe a suburban girl. As a kid I lived in a typical cookie-cutter neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas. We lived there until I was twelve, while my dad kind of worked his way up the corporate ladder for Firestone. But as a small child I would often go visit my friend’s farm. She had silos that we would play in—I thought that was the coolest thing.
My friend hated living out on that farm. She wanted to come play at my house so she could be in a neighborhood, riding bikes with all my friends. But I liked going to her house because it was a farm. We would pretend we were these farm girls that wore aprons, and we’d come up with stories like, “Let’s pretend that Bobby got stuck in the silo.” We played so much make-believe at that farm that I feel as though farm living was a part of my past, even though it really wasn’t. Driving through the beautiful farmlands along the back roads of New York brought back the memories of my time spent there.
The grass is always greener, right? We were both brought up in these sort of cookie-cutter neighborhoods, but in my case, I loved going to my granddad’s ranch. That was definitely where I got the cowboy in my personality. My granddad J. B. was a bona fide cowboy. He was like the Marlboro man, literally—smoked cigarettes, tall, lean, great-looking dude, always had this gorgeous cowboy hat on, wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants every day of his life, even when it was a hundred degrees outside. He was just one of these iconic characters. I still to this day think of him as the hero of all heroes, the legend of all legends.