Chemtrails. Yes. I see a cloud that looks like a chemtrail, streaking across the far corners of the horizon.
“Nothing,” Mary says. “Mama sees nothing, and now we should go home.” She nudges me. “Right, Mama?”
“Right,” I echo, and smile at the girls. “Nothing.” Together we walk back down the hill toward the house.
Six hours later, I beam at my family. I cry out with joy, “Dinner is ready!”
26
Of the millionsof Angry Women who would eventually come to know and love Yesteryear Ranch, many of them would believe—and argue, and debate, and insist—that they had been there from the very start. That I created the account the day we signed the papers for the ranch, and thatthey—my beloved disciples, my furious little women—had been there for every single moment of the journey.
In a very simple sense, they were correct. Ididcreate the account the day we signed for the ranch, and if a very simple person—and it seems many of my followers were very simple people—were to skim along the first pictures of my account, hopping from happy caption to happy caption, they might make the assumption that they were witnessing the foundation-setting of an empire.Thebrick-by-brick creation of a true American dream!
The only problem with that assumption would be the dates. Meaning: I shared a mere six pictures over the course of the first three years. Six images, sixmoments,were captured out of the millions that took place. Which is by design, I suppose. No one wants to learn life lessons or buy pie crusts from a woman who’s near-constantly covered in another animal’s shit.
Picture 1
There I am, rosy-cheeked in overalls, standing in front of thebig red barn with Clementine, who is about to turn one year old. Clementine has an expression of grim determination on her face. I am young and beautiful and smiling ear to ear.
Caption:Surprise! We bought a farm.
The day of the inspection, we flew into Sun Valley and drove three hours out to the ranch. Caleb insisted on renting a pickup truck, “just to get used to country life.” I rolled my eyes but said nothing, just stood there in my little closing-day outfit—navy blue prairie dress, heeled boots, a brand-new overcoat, all purchased after Doug’s deposit reached our checking account—and smiled at the parking garage attendants while Caleb pointed at the biggest, most unreasonable truck in the rental parking lot. “But we only have a twenty-minute drive,” I said as cheerily as I could manage—an argument that failed to sway my husband from his selection, and also incidentally turned out not to be true.
Initially, back at the Mills estate, I had looked up the distance from my mother’s house to the driveway entrance of Yesteryear and saw it was twenty miles. Utterly manageable, I thought, except I hadn’t accounted for all the lovely little details of rural life that would stretch those twenty miles into a marathon drive: the cattle pass grates, the winding mountain roads, the industrial-size tractors that motored along at five miles an hour in the middle of the road. Those three hours felt longer than the entirety of our twelve-hour road trip from Idaho to California, because my once-quiet husband was now fully incapable of shutting up. He talked nonstop about soil acidity and tractor options, the benefits of growing garlic versus buying it at the store, why raw milk was so much safer than pasteurized. At one point he glanced out the side of the driver window and said, “See that?”
I gazed out at the mountains. “See what?”
“Nothing,” he said. “No chemtrails overhead.” As he set down the soda, burped, and rolled into a long monologue about how we should file right away for dark sky protections, I reminded myself to set screen limits for my husband when we got home. He’d beenspending too much time on YouTube these days. He was starting to sound like a hick.
Eventually we finally turned off the highway and down the long dirt road that would becomeourlong dirt road, and my mood brightened considerably. For another five minutes, we rolled along bumpily beneath the trees in silence. Then we turned the final corner and climbed up and over the hill, and—
Oh.
The truck came to a stop by the barn. Caleb threw the car into park and said, “Damn.”
Breathtaking. It was breathtaking. The barn, the mountains, the house. All of it was so much more beautiful in three dimensions than I could’ve possibly imagined when I saw it online. Dead center in this tableau was one of my mother’s real-estate agent friends, who was standing by the porch stairs, nearly hopping with excitement to meet us. This was undoubtedly the biggest commission of her life.
A minute later, Caleb took that infamous first picture of me and Clementine. We’d upgraded our flip phones to smartphones recently; Caleb had downloaded social media apps for both of us. “This is how people share information now,” he had said, insisting I should create an account too, but all I saw on my feed once I did were bags and wine bottles and bright white teeth.
The picture would, on that first day, receive four likes in total from the four people who followed me: my sister, my mother, my mother-in-law, and Caleb. I didn’t care. In fact it would be several years before I realized that the laws of social media were the same as the laws of physics, equal parts invisible and accumulative in their power. Like the scientists who first discovered the atom: How could they have possibly known that the identification of something so small, so elemental, could one day lead to the nuclear bomb?
Picture 2
A landscape portrait of the rolling, snow-covered hills of Yesteryear. Blinding, untouched white, beneath a divinely blue sky.
Caption:there’s a season for everything.
During our inspection we learned about an infestation of black mold that had taken over one of the bathrooms in the house. I thought of that poor old man, who had been unknowingly breathing in the spores, and his son with the cancer. Very sad. Then I realized that dealing with the mold meant more time at Doug and Amelia’s house, so I said, “Can’t we just take our chances?”
Caleb gave me a look. “Clementine could develop asthma.”
“Plenty of people have asthma and go on to live perfectly full lives!”
Caleb didn’t buy that, and so we waited while the house was chemically treated, and they kept finding more mold—“There are so many black clouds, it almost looks like a fairy-tale curse,” the contractor said cheerfully—and before we knew it, another set of seasons passed with my in-laws. During that time, the strangest thing happened: my husband began waking up at the same time as me. By five in the morning, as I was moving through my beauty routine, he would already be in front of his computer, scrolling through online chat forums about farming. It was shocking to witness such a sharp onset of ambition in a man previously defined by the lack thereof. Each morning, I thought,There’s no way this will last.And each new morning, it did.
Other things happened during that time period, too. I finished weaning Clementine from breastmilk, and she started eating solid foods. She took her first steps and said her first word.Mama.Then she said it again, more insistently, and then soon it was not so much a word as a chant, a royal demand that rang in my ears even when she was rooms away, fast asleep at naptime.Mamamamamamamamamamama—
It seemed that Doug and Amelia were both experiencing changes of their own during that time period, too. At family dinner one night, Doug said he was planning on paying a consulting team to do some hush-hush research on the relative viability of a third presidential campaign. This seemed unremarkable to me—we werealwaystalking about the proverbial campaign—but Caleb and Amelia both seemed to stiffen at the news. This meant, apparently, that it was actually happening. Another bid for president was now on the family horizon. “Excuse me,” Amelia said softly, and I watched in surprise as she left the table. Later, Caleb told me the last presidential campaign (which took place when he was in middle school) had beenhard on their marriage. “She doesn’t like all the cameras and questions,” he said, which made me realize that attention, or too much of it, could become another form of clutter.
