The Bucolic Plague

  “We’re thrilled to help out.”

  It was the 2008 annual Sharon Springs Historical Society Tour of Homes. Doug and Garth had tried to warn us against taking part, calling it the “Snoop and Poop Tour.” The last time they opened their own home for the historical society, someone went through their nightstand while someone else clogged their toilet.

  But we were excited to meet even more of our neighbors. Brent, of course, couldn’t bear the thought of actually being inside with all those people who no doubt came by for the express purpose of scratching his floors. So we stood on the porch outside greeting everyone who entered.

  “I have to go weed the strawberry beds,” I said, already tired of smiling. “Do you want to help?”

  “No, I want to keep an eye on things.”

  “For what? It’s the Sharon Springs Historical Society. I highly doubt they have plans to trash the place.”

  “I’m staying here,” he said, ending yet another discussion.

  We still weren’t really speaking with each other. Brent was growing exceedingly anxious about a possible visit from Martha. She’d brought it up several more times lately. To me it seemed as if it was her personal method of torturing him. I was growing more frustrated by the lists of chores that seemed to neglect the things I truly cared about. I didn’t care if the fenceposts were perfectly straight, but I did care that the tomatoes were solidly staked before they tipped over.

  This weekend was going to be particularly difficult to get through. And in addition to putting on our usual happy faces for the Web site photos, we also had to do it in front of real people.

  We’d agreed last year that we’d open the home for the historical society’s annual fund-raiser. In the weeks leading up to it, the president of the society gleefully informed us that they’d had more interest than ever. The Beekman hadn’t been open to the public since the Selzners had renovated it. It was the first chance for many people across the county to see the interior. Plus there was the added benefit of meeting TV’s own “Dr. Brent.”

  Oh, and the other guy.

  Naturally, rumors had also been flying that Martha would be here this weekend. Little did everyone know that this actually was one of the weekends that Martha had tentatively scheduled for her visit. Instead she’d taken a last-minute jaunt to Russia to watch her billionaire boyfriend launch himself into space on a Russian spacecraft. She’d actually packed him lunches for the trip. America’s lifestyle maven was going universal.

  Even though Brent would no doubt disagree, the Beekman was in tip-top shape for the historical society tour. The row of white hydrangeas was standing tall and proud along the back of the wraparound columned porch. Dozens of different lily varieties were blooming in the flower garden, as were the delphiniums, irises, and poppies. John had been working late into the night, after arriving home from his new job, sweeping and organizing the barn so that the visitors could admire his goats. It was a perfectly sunny day, and—even though I was dead tired and frustrated—I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride for all we’d accomplished as I watched small clusters of visitors exploring the grounds.

  There was a momentary lull in new visitors, which meant that Brent and I could take a break from greeting people and stand in stony silence instead.

  “It was so much nicer when the Selzners were here.”

  “Oh, I know. Pat invited me over once. It was beautiful.”

  “There’s not a single picture on the walls.”

  The voices were coming through the open window behind me. I had no idea who was speaking, but I continued listening in, my heart dropping with each word. I knew Brent heard them as well.

  “They don’t have any furniture! It’s like an echo chamber in here.”

  “The previous owners had so many beautiful antiques.”

  “I don’t like modern things. It seems so cold.”

  “Yuck. Look at all these flies.”

  “The flies are everywhere! It’s filthy.”

  “Where’s Martha?”

  “They said that Martha was going to be here.”

  “I can’t believe we drove out here for this.”

  And then:

  “Those two act like their shit doesn’t stink.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. These were the people who smiled and waved at us as we drove by. These were the people who always told us how happy they were that we’d come to their village, and were building a new business there.

  I suddenly felt as if I were standing on the porch naked.

  No, we didn’t have money to buy priceless antiques. We didn’t have a staff to decorate, and clean, and make flower arrangements, and garden. Didn’t they realize that the picture-perfect Beekman they’d read about on the Web site was entirely a product of myself, Brent’s, and Farmer John’s labor? And on top of it all, we all had full-time jobs during the week?

  I knew their criticisms probably stung Brent even harder.

  “C’mon,” I said to Brent. “Let’s go to the garden.”

  He knew I was trying to save him, and for once, he let me. Neither one of us mentioned that we’d overheard the insults. I tried to make small talk to distract us both.

  “So did Martha give you any new dates she might visit?” I asked, stooping over to pull weeds from a seventeenth-century variety of French melon.

  “No.”

  “Think it’ll be this month?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Well, she’ll have to come by the end of August or she’ll miss the best produce of the garden.”

  “Look. I don’t know when she’s coming. I said that already,” Brent hissed at me.

  We continued weeding in the silence we’d lately grown accustomed to.

  “Oh, your melons are so far along for this time of year!” a voice called out from behind me. I looked up to see an older woman wearing a loose, bright purple sweater over a long denim skirt. On her wide straw hat she’d pinned a massive pink peony blossom. Her long gray hair hung over her shoulders.

  “Do you think so?” I asked. “I kinda thought they looked a little spindly.”

  “Oh no, it’s very difficult to grow melons this far north. I think you just might get a decent crop.”

  She asked us if it was okay for her to tour the garden. As long as you don’t insult us, I thought.

  Brent and I walked the woman around the beds, telling her the histories of each seed variety. She seemed quite knowledgeable herself, and explained that she had a fairly large garden of her own in the next county over.

  “Of course it’s not quite as neat and formal as this one,” she said, laughing. “It’s a little more Wabi Sabi.”

  “A little more what?” I asked.

  “Wabi Sabi,” she repeated.

  All I could think of was Martha’s tuna burgers with wasabi mayonnaise. Did this woman own a horseradish farm?

  The woman patiently leaned against our potting table and began to explain the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi.

  “Overly simplified,” she explained, “it defines beauty as imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”

  Great, I thought. After waiting all week to work in the garden, now I had to stand here and listen to some kook and her philosophy. But her manner was so kind and open that she quickly won us over. If we’d learned anything from Sharon Springs, it’s that trying to stop the constant flow of eccentricity was like trying to plug up the town’s once famous springs.

  “Take this basket of strawberries,” she said, picking up the small pint-full I’d picked earlier in the morning. “These strawberries are smaller, and more misshapen than the ones you’d get in the supermarket. And because they’re picked at the peak of ripeness, you know that they’re decaying as we speak. And unlike supermarket berries, which you eat and never think about again, these strawberry plants need to be nurtured, year in and year out. They’ll never be finished. It’s all Wabi Sabi, and why many people believe these ugly strawberries are more valuable and beautiful
than the most perfectly shaped supermarket berries.”

  I understood what she was saying, but it seemed too simplistic and perhaps a bit fatalistic. I was still striving to produce the most beautiful, perfectly shaped berries that I possibly could that also tasted perfect. By her standards, why wouldn’t I just let the berry rows fill in with weeds and go unwatered until the strawberries are shriveled and ugly? Wouldn’t that be super-duper Wabi Sabi? When I questioned this, she clarified.

  “It’s fine that one strives for beauty, but if one only finds it in perfection, then it will remain forever hidden. The Greeks pursued the aesthetic of the perfection. And still their marble statues chipped over time. Wabi Sabi would say their statues are even more beautiful chipped.”

  Something began to intuitively make sense. I remembered Martha’s farm, and how every inch was so perfectly manicured that the guests entertained themselves by seeking out imperfections.

  “Or take the Beekman itself,” our new friend continued. This ought to be good. We were still stinging from other people’s insults, and she was about to list our every flaw. “I’ve driven by it for years,” she continued. “For a long time, when it was abandoned, its only beauty was in its decay. Then when the Selzners purchased it, they tried to restore it to the majestic beauty it once was. But they rarely visited. Since it went practically unused, it was easy to keep it looking ‘perfect.’”

  She paused to eat one of our Wabi Sabi strawberries.

  “I read your blogs all the time,” she went on, “and I’ve loved watching and reading about the place come back to life. When you two bought the Beekman, you began using it. And with use, comes decay. And with decay comes work. And with work comes dedication. And with dedication comes creativity. And on and on. You two will never be finished with the Beekman, it will never be perfect, and it will always be falling to pieces around you.”

  “So what you’re saying,” I clarified, “is that Brent shouldn’t yell at me for not getting the house painted. He should thank me.”

  She laughed.

  Brent didn’t.

  “I think what I’m saying,” she concluded, smiling, “is that the Beekman is now the most beautiful it’s ever been.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Okay, great,” the director said. “Now do the same thing only with more…”

  “I know, I know…sizzle,” I answered. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to make kneading bread “sizzle” on film.

  The cameraman was standing outside on the porch filming my hands and forearms through the open kitchen window as they kneaded the dough. After fifteen years in advertising, I was used to the repetitive boredom of shoots. But I’d never been on the front side of the camera.

  We were shooting what we’d learned was called a “sizzle tape.” It’s a roughly ten-minute video that production companies use when they pitch television show concepts to networks.

  This all came about when a friend of ours was having dinner with a noted daytime talk-show Celebrity who is not Oprah or Martha and her executive producer, and somehow the story of our hapless Thanksgiving turkey murder made its way around the expensive New York City restaurant table. The Celebrity felt that perhaps our life at the Beekman might make for an interesting reality show television series, and invited us to her Soho loft to discuss the possibilities.

  We arrived at her loft bearing gifts of freshly laid eggs, homemade pickles, handmade soaps, and firmly bitten tongues. Brent and I hadn’t exchanged a nice word in months. We both knew a television show about the Beekman would be a huge coup. It would basically be a half-hour commercial for the business. All we had to do was act as if we liked each other, which, lately, would demand an Oscar-caliber performance.

  The Celebrity owned a couple of country homes herself, so she wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the charms of rural living. We gave our spiel about how most Americans had forgotten many of the simpler pleasures of life and how to provide for themselves. We discussed how the art of gracious living had largely fallen by the wayside.

  We spent the next two hours brainstorming possible show concepts together, finally settling on something similar to Green Acres crossed with Project Runway crossed with Martha Stewart crossed with Paris Hilton crossed with The Beverly Hillbillies crossed with I Love Lucy. Apparently reality on its own is not a winning concept for a reality show. I knew we were probably veering off course when I found myself referring to my vision for “the Josh character.”

  “Maybe we should just send a director and cameraman up there to film for a day and see what comes back,” the executive producer suggested.

  “What happens on a normal day at the farm?” the Celebrity asked.

  “Well,” Brent answered, “this weekend we have to clean out the chicken coop.”

  “Great! What else?” the Celebrity asked, no doubt envisioning the two of us in our city suits and ties covered with chicken shit and feathers.

  “Umm. That’s about it,” I said. “It’ll take all weekend. Chickens are incredibly industrious manure makers.”

  The Celebrity looked a little worried. I’d come to realize that while most Americans don’t have any idea what actually happens on a farm, they all think they do. Having spent hours as children with their Fisher-Price farms and pull-string toys that make animal noises, people have created a tableau of farm life in their heads that couldn’t be further from reality. They envision Brent and me spending our weekends driving a big red tractor aimlessly around the barnyard, taking breaks to milk things and perhaps tote a bale of hay somewhere. Fisher-Price seems to ensure that every little kid grows up with a false perception of the lives of firemen, policemen, and farmers. Maybe if they made more accounting office play sets and little middle management figures, they’d hit the mark better—or at least be more demographically accurate.

  “Well, why don’t you come up with a list of chores,” the executive producer suggested. “We’ll film a little bit of all of them.”

  Coming up with a list of chores was hardly a problem. Coming up with a list of chores that America would want to watch us doing would be more challenging.

  But if we were going to create a successful television show, I guess that’s the kind of reality we’d have to learn how to fake.

  “Go ahead and talk to each other more,” the director instructed. “Just pretend we’re not here.”

  If you weren’t here, I thought, we wouldn’t be talking at all. Even if we weren’t fighting, it’s really unnatural to be continuously speaking with one’s partner. As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of being with the same person for many years is not so that he or she can finish your sentences, but so that you rarely have to start one to begin with.

  “So,” I began awkwardly, trying to fake a real conversation with Brent, “this bread seems to be coming out very nicely.”

  “Yes,” Brent replied, “it looks very good.”

  What the hell else is there to say?

  “I’ll be kneading this bread for about eight to ten minutes,” I added.

  “And then will you bake it?” Brent asked.

  “Yes, then I will bake it at four hundred twenty-five degrees for about twenty minutes.”

  “Or until it sounds hollow when thumped,” Brent added.

  “Yes.”

  I was out of words, and we were only forty seconds into the take. This didn’t bode well.

  The next several staged chores and resulting dialogue seemed similarly stilted:

  “Josh, did you know that this is a common thistle plant? It should always be pulled before going to seed…”

  “Brent, one of the wondrous properties of goat manure is that it doesn’t need to be composted.”

  “Say, Josh, many people don’t realize that turkeys raised in factory farms are often sickened by rhinotracheitis and colisepticemia.”

  At some point during the morning, I realized that the most exciting moment of our potential reality show would be the copyright notice in the credits. T
o compensate, I came to the conclusion that if I ran everywhere—physically moved my body faster—the film might seem more engaging. I galloped out to the end of the drive to get the mail. I trotted to the garage to grab a trowel. After we hooked up the tractor to spread some manure, I ran alongside Brent as he drove it across the field.

  For even more “sizzle,” instead of simply leading the goats out to graze as we usually did, I raced out in front of them, hollering an improvisational goat call that made me sound like a yodeling hillbilly. I turned back toward the barn and saw that the goats had stayed back, huddled together in fear in the barn doorway. They obviously preferred to skip dinner rather than get too close to the retarded scarecrow suffering a grand mal seizure.

  But there still wasn’t enough sizzle for the director. Maybe, I suggested, we should try some other reality show tactics. Perhaps I should admit to an affair while canning green beans. Or threaten to vote Brent off the farm by forming a secret alliance with the goats. Or maybe we needed some sort of catchphrase, like “Now that’s good livin’!” or, “Manure, schmanure!”

  The director finally decided that interaction with the animals “read well” on camera, so Brent and I took turns cuddling every creature we could lay our hands on—even the turkeys, who flailed and flapped their wings in objection as if we were colisepticemia carriers.

  I was exhausted by noon. Doing five-minute snippets of a lot of chores was harder work than actually finishing one of them.

  “Well, Brent,” I emoted, trying not to run into the cameraman walking backward in front of us. “Shall we rustle up some lunch?”

  “Sure, Josh. Let’s see if that bread’s ready yet!”

  I broke into my trademark gallop back toward the house.

  By late afternoon, I was so bored with my own reality, I wished I could aim a remote and shut myself off. When I was growing up in Wisconsin, I would daydream about becoming a television celebrity while spending hour after boring hour weeding the family garden. Now that we had a shot at being on a television series, all I wanted was to be left alone so I could go weed my garden.