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.
I don’t mean to overstate that, because my dad was a huge hero to me too. He was the one who was there, who loved us, who was at every ball game, and my granddad wasn’t the doting, overtly loving kind of guy. But he was kind of the patriarch of the family, and spending time with him on that ranch made a big impact on my life.
I may have grown up in the suburbs, like most kids did, but I’ve always felt like J. B. and I had a lot in common. And I’ve always felt like I was born a hundred years too late.
For either of us to romanticize farm life was probably a silly thing to do. It’s a lot of work. For my friend, living on a farm just meant she had a whole lot of chores to do. But no matter how much I heard her complain, I still thought, That’s what I want someday. So having that little taste of farm life on our honeymoon sure felt right to both of us.
Days later, somewhere along the woodsy coast of Maine, at around eleven o’clock at night, we had another memorable moment. We were tooling around a corner when Chip slammed on the brakes, squealing to a dead stop. He and I both stared out through the windshield and said, “What in the world is that?!”
Luckily we weren’t in a hurry and weren’t driving too fast, because right in front of us was this big, awkward-looking moose standing right in the middle of the road. Neither one of us had ever seen one in person, and we just could not believe how big this thing was. It was like a dream come true for me to come across an animal like that in the wild.
Once I realized what it was, I was like, “What should we do? I feel like we should do something!” But Jo said, “Let the poor thing go,” so I did. We watched that majestic beast wander off into the woods and disappear in the darkness just as fast as he’d shown up in our headlights.
I feel like the moose was our final big find of that trip. We were both tired, and after seeing something that magnificent, we decided it was time to head home. We took a different route down through Boston and realized as we drove through the city that we were basically out of money. We had nothing left. We stayed on the interstates after that and made it back to New York with as few stops as possible, arriving just in time to fly back home.
Jo’s idea of being “broke” was when she had, like, $1,000 left in the bank. But “broke” for me meant actually broke. I wasn’t much for bank accounts or credit cards back then. So once we got back to Waco, we literally had no money left for a hotel room or anything. We had no choice but to go straight to the vacated rental house we were planning to move into.
The students had just moved out of it while we were on our honeymoon, and it was nighttime when we got back home, so we didn’t have a chance to get in and inspect it or clean the place or anything like that. We just drove in from the airport and pulled up in front of that little yellow house on Third Street, at the end of this dreamy honeymoon of a lifetime—
And Chip carried me over the threshold. Right into a nightmare.
FOUR
THE HONEYMOON’S OVER
The rental houses on Third Street that Chip owned when we got married were really small, and not the most attractive homes. I wouldn’t have chosen to live in any one of them if I could avoid it. Thankfully, though, the nicest one of the bunch happened to open up at the end of the spring semester, and Chip hadn’t put any summer renters into it yet. It was a yellow ranch-style with a nice white porch on the front and a pair of huge magnolia trees in the yard, and it was bigger than the rest—maybe twelve hundred square feet or so. It was just pretty enough that I was excited to live there and fix it up—to make it feel like our very own home.
Chip and I were both exhausted when we finally pulled up in front of that house, but we were still riding the glow of our honeymoon, and I was so excited as he carried me over the threshold—until the smell nearly knocked us over.
“Oh my word,” I said, pinching my nose and trying to hold my breath so I wouldn’t gag. “What is that?”
Chip flicked the light switch, and the light didn’t come on. He flicked it up and down a few times, then felt his way forward in the darkness and tried another switch.
“The electricity’s off,” he said. “The girls must’ve had it shut off when they moved out.”
“Didn’t you transfer it back into your name?” I asked.
“I guess not. I’m sorry, babe,” Chip said.
“Chip, what is that smell?”