I didn’t exactly mean to keep the trip a secret from Mr Smith, but it was only a couple hours drive from our place in Brooklyn, and we were only going for a couple nights, so I figured I’d withhold some details for fun. It was unfortunate, then, that our cat had to be hospitalized two days before we were meant to leave, because our schedules were too packed to rebook quickly, and the trip had to be moved six weeks out.
This gave us a lot more time to anticipate the trip than I’d originally planned, and what began as a little air of mystery, employed by me on a playful whim, inadvertently ballooned into a full-blown surprise. I knew very little about the place we were going, but at this point, I needed it to deliver.
When my phone’s navigation said we were only five minutes away, I got a little worried. We’d been driving through vacant, rural plots of land for a while. Mr Smith laughed, puzzled, and ruled out a spa weekend.
But then I saw it, a sweet little sign that read Wildflower Farms, and I told him to turn. As we rolled cautiously over the gravelly entrance, we were set onto a winding path between lush greens and a sprawling vegetable farm, a greenhouse in the distance.
‘Where are we?’ he asked. Still nervous, I offered no answer, and then came a better one than I could have crafted myself.
The path delivered us to a cavernous open-air lodge, its high wood-beamed ceiling framing an idyllic view of the grounds – grassy fields tilting in the golden wind, wooden cabins nestled between walking paths, stoic mountains in the distance. Somewhere, maybe everywhere, birds chirped at our arrival. We looked at each other, eyes wide. The place was delivering.
If the guys working the valet noticed our beat-up Civic was considerably junkier than the cars of other guests, their behavior didn’t betray it for a second. In fact, they acted like they’d been waiting for us all day, greeting us like family, insisting on taking our duffels to our room for us.
This was the first of several times we felt like undeserving celebrities at Wildflower, the second being moments after we handed over our keys and were offered a choice between being driven to our cabin in a snappy little golf cart like Justin Bieber on a Hollywood studio lot, or enjoying a proprietary exfoliating hand wash and homemade lemonade. Obviously, we said yes to everything.
The man driving the cart told us he could come back to pick us up any time, which made us laugh when we realized he was driving us about 200 yards away, to our cabin on the southern loop of the property.
Our room was rustic but in the fancy way: smooth wide-plank floors and a vaulted ceiling, grandma-heirloom quilts and expensive-looking rugs, a wall of glass doors opening up to a private deck. Filled with furniture that looked handmade by Aiden Shaw himself.
On a small table, we found a Wildflower bib and a tiny, semi-naked cake sprinkled with dried rose petals. Next to both, a note: Haley & Avi, May your love bring you life, and your life bring you love. (In a quick email months before, I’d told them it was our anniversary, and that I was knocked up, and now they were really making me look good.)
The first thing we did was stand on the deck and listen to the wildlife, which you’re required to do once a year if you live in New York City, lest you harden into urine-soaked stone. Afterward, we followed a walking path we found outside our cabin that circled around the whole place, through a forest and past a river, which we appraised for the requisite minutes (three).
We were particularly excited to see the farm; I told Mr Smith there’d be animals. It took us some time to navigate there using our paper map, which I credit entirely to user error. The grounds weren’t particularly big, but they were so varied –from forest to meadow to farmstead – that it was easy to get lost along the walking paths. Greeting us at every turn were the croaks of unseen frogs, which we concluded sounded like the rapper E-40 (a comfort).
We were overcome when we found the donkeys. A young farmhand introduced us to Donkey-xote (or was it just Don Quixote, and the magic was in the context?) and his baby Gus. He let us feed them from a dusty bag of unidentified something.
The farmhand was cute and covered in dirt, which lent the place an air of extra legitimacy. This was not just a petting zoo for city folks. This became especially clear when we came across the pigs.
The sound came before the visual: a symphony of wet grunts. Tucked away among the trees we found about a dozen of them, all covered in mud from head to trotter, demolishing slop in the way the metaphors go. One came towards us and tipped itself over into a puddle of muck, and we’d never been more charmed in our lives.
Back at the cabin we showered for dinner. I might have left this part out if not for the unusual texture of the water, which, I kid you not, seemed to produce the same effects on our skin as moisturizer. We took to calling it ‘lotion water’ and proceeded to talk about it incessantly for the next day and a half.
Somehow we were on a farm, but also in a luxury resort that smelled like wood, but also at a spa and simultaneously in the forest. In a corny kind of spirit, I put on ‘This Must Be the Place’ by The Talking Heads. In our branded robes and slippers, we had some pre-dinner cake.
The weather looked ominous as we headed to the restaurant at the lodge. While we sat around the fire waiting for a table, a crack of thunder rang out over the farm, now covered in a grandma-heirloom quilt of clouds. By the time we were seated inside, the rain was coming down so hard that all of us in the restaurant kept turning around to look, like starry-eyed kids hoping for a snow day.
We ordered the garden milk bread with summer tomato, the gold bar squash with pearl onions and basil, and the Wildflower farm pork (hopefully not the cute muddy boys). I hate to be hyperbolic, but the milk bread, which came crispy, steaming, and sprinkled with maldon and a side of miso butter‚ might be the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
I was so overcome by it that I knew no other way to cope but to take several unnecessary photos, which I’ve never looked at again. It proceeded to rain all night, the perfect soundtrack to a bedtime Family Feud marathon (linear TV in bed: a vacation luxury).
The next day, the grounds were sunny and damp. We had an early alarm set to feed the chickens – we’d been told we could collect some eggs for breakfast, something we’d never done in our lives, obviously. But mainly we wanted to see the chickens, an animal we’ve been known to DM back and forth to each other when we’re avoiding work. (For proof of my dedication, a tattoo of a fluffy rooster can be spotted wandering around my upper left thigh.)
We spent a considerable amount of time in the coop, feeding the flock from our palms and asking the farm employees for names (they didn’t have any). Eventually, we pried ourselves away for breakfast by the meadow: a bowl of recently-picked berries, a plate of scrambled farm eggs and sausage, a glass of fresh orange juice, and a cinnamon roll the size of frisbee, slathered in cream cheese frosting and flower petals. Naturally, I felt sick afterward, but in the fun way.
We still had the whole day ahead of us – our only full one at Wildflower – and the sky didn’t look like it was going to hold. We ran back to our cabin before the thunder, where we enjoyed a late-morning spot of Steve Harvey polling a studio audience about where a stripper keeps her gun (‘in her hair’, apparently).
Our weather apps projected on-and-off storms all day. Bolstered by the magic of the last 24 hours, we refused to stew in disappointment, and spent the rest of the afternoon indulging whatever called to us, running intermittently and gleefully for cover from the downpour.
We did yoga by a pond (while it rained), ordered poolside chicken fingers in our bathing suits (under an umbrella, because it was raining), and took a sound bath (then a rain bath). Each its own kind of bliss. Back at the room that night, robed and lotion-watered, we fell asleep to the pitter-patter of rain and the sweet, sexist musings of Family Feud.
In my final bid for girlfriend of the year, I’d booked us massages at the spa the next morning, our last activity before morning check-out. Prenatal for me and a deep tissue for him – and I include that detail only because, a few days later, one of us may have Googled ‘can deep tissue massages make you cry for days afterward?’ (they were good cries!).
Suffice it to say, we were adequately softened. We met each other outside by the fire, dazed looks in our eyes, and plopped down in two adirondacks for a final hit of nature.
Wistful to be leaving, we agreed it was better that it stormed while we were there. A sunny day would have invited too much pressure, we said, cocooned in robes and sweet delusion.
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Haley Nahman is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor, formerly deputy editor at Man Repeller (RIP) and now author of much-loved newsletter, Maybe Baby, which has featured in The New Yorker. She’s also written for New York Magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian.