As she stood up, I faced my reflection again, busying myself with the apron bow. I wasn’t smiling anymore. “Tell Nanny Louise to look at the weather forecast,” I said to Clementine. “It might rain today. The children should wear boots.”
Clementine didn’t respond, and by the time I turned back around, she was gone.
Nannies. It had to be the nannies. They were constantly leaving their phones on countertops and couch cushions, no matter how many times I told them not to. It was an overwhelming task, protecting your child from the world. Jessa and Junebug were still so young, so impressionable—but Clementine? Practically a woman now. She couldn’t be trusted.
Do your children enjoy being filmed?
“Oh! They love it.”
The plan for this Content Day was to make a boule with my famous sourdough starter and to depict a Nativity scene on the dough with herbs I’d personally picked from our garden. This was, excuse the pun, my literal bread and butter. Plus, the holiday season always led to a major boom for our online store (Yesteryear Ranch Cherry Cutting Board, $120, made in Brazil; Yesteryear Ranch French Salt Blend, $45, made in France; Yesteryear Ranch patented indoor paint gallons in shades of Homestead, Pioneer, and Cowgirl, $80 per gallon, all made in America). The boule wasn’t the main attraction so much as the gateway drug: Baby Lavender Jesus in a Rosemary manger, three wise Thyme sprig men, fa la la and the followers would click, click, click, until their hearts—and their online shopping carts—were full. They would beg—they were alwaysbegging—for more.
The herb boule took four hours. A standard amount of time, which would be clipped and snipped by Shannon into a thirty-second time lapse, my fingers spinning dizzily around the screen, packing and kneading and caressing a lump of pale dough. The second half of the day was Natural Dinner. I was going to make a traditional Sunday roast (or should I say a trad Sunday roast?I planned to write in the caption, with a winky face; that would really drive the Angry Women up a wall). All the ingredients would be sourced from our very own farm, except for the beef itself, which technically came from the supermarket on the other side of the mountain pass.
At some point in the early afternoon, we realized we were out of fresh eggs, so we decided to make a trip to the chicken coop. The sky and the mountains performed beautifully for us. I walked blissfully over to the coop, Jessa and Junebug clinging to my skirt as we mucked along in the mud and said hello to our ladies, which is what I called the chickens whenever I was being filmed.The ladies.
“Hello, ladies,” I sang out. “How are y’all doing today?”
Behind me, Shannon tripped on her video cord and swore loudly. “Sorry,” she said, “can you do that part again?”
Of course I could. I could do any of it on command, a million times over, in a million variations of singsong. “Hello, ladies! How are y’all doing today?”
“Perfect. Let’s move on to a shot of the egg pickup.”
“I say,” someone said from behind. “Is that Marilyn Monroe by the chicken coop?”
It might as well have been!I rolled my eyes and laughed, had a single moment to smooth my skirt and pray that Shannon was still filming before Caleb strode into the coop, grabbed me by the waist, and dipped me low. He kissed me while our daughters cheered. Then he lifted me back up, grinning as I slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “You got my boots all dirty!”
“Little dirt never killed anybody.” He tipped his cowboy hat to me and winked.
I laughed and rolled my eyes again. “We’refilming,Caleb.”
As if he didn’t know.
“Actually,” Shannon said, “we’re not. I paused right before Caleb spoke. So you guys are good. If you want to take a quick break, I can go have some coffee.”
“Oh,” I said, crestfallen. “Okay. Well, we don’t actually have to—”
But Shannon was already trudging away with the camera, walking quickly toward the house.
Caleb patted my behind twice, gently. As we watched Shannon throw open the front door with an unnecessary amount of force, he said, “She still upset?”
A surge of emotion rolled through me.
“Yes, Caleb. She’s still upset.”
“Well. She’ll feel better soon. When we—”
I looked at him, and he fell silent. “You don’t understand women at all.”
He was about to reply, and I was about to cut him off with an even sharper statement, and then both of us seemed to realize at the exact same time that we were being watched.
Jessa, Junebug. Little girls, sweet things, peering up at us. Watching, always. Where the hell was Nanny Aimee?
No matter. It was good practice, anyway. That was what I told myself when I found myself under surveillance by a child who should’ve been under surveillance by someone else:It’s good practice!A flawless performance, after all, does not arrive overnight. It takes years—and years, and years—of practice.
I leaned forward on tiptoes and kissed Caleb twice in quick succession. “Get back to work, cowboy.” The girls laughed and clapped, and I flushed from the reward. Caleb tipped his hat to the three of us and strode back toward the barn, where he would probably spend an hour or two messing around with the organization of some hay bales. Caleb was very good at keeping himself busy. Hewas also very good at only ever doing the farm chores that he actually enjoyed: milking Sassafras, driving the big John Deere tractor around in tight donuts in the pastures, staying up all night with a laboring sow. As for the chores he didn’t enjoy—cleaning, planting, picking, mucking out the stalls—he left all that to the ranch hands.
Hold on. You have ranch hands, too?
