don’t u realize how many people don’t have access to this???
Ew is she drinking milk straight outta the udder
Yikes i get that u live on a farm but this is honestly so out of touch
Omg YUM if only I could drink thru the screen!
So Shannon had been paying close attention to me for a while now. She was young, this girl, but she was not a child.
And me? I was thirty years old.Practically an old maid!Newly pregnant with our fifth child.Junebug.The account had just passed two million followers on Instagram. I’d just begun considering expanding to other platforms. Weeks earlier, I’d issued a callout for a producer position via my Instagram page. I received hundreds of applications. Nearly all of them came from women who looked like me. And then there was Shannon. When I clicked on her Instagram handle, I was certain there’d been some kind of error. That she’d linked the wrong account in her application or something. But no, there she was, ripped jeans and John Lennon sunglasses, smiling bitchily at the camera, the Brooklyn Bridge stretching wide behind her. The last kind of woman I would expect to want to work with a woman like me.
“So,” she said now. “Let’s talk about your account.” She cupped her coffee in both hands. Leaned forward, a glimmer in her hipster eye. “I think there’s something really radical about what you do, Natalie.”
I resisted the urge, as instinctual as a spasm, to tell her to call me Mrs. Heller Mills. “Oh?”
“Absolutely. Everyone at my school loves you, you know. They think you’re a feminist icon.”
For a moment my guard dropped. I leaned back and snorted. “Really?”
She laughed. “Hell yeah! I mean, no one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech asshole, just so they can get access to shitty healthcare and put away like five dollars a month for their retirement.”
“Just so they can breastfeed in a broom closet someday,” I added quickly. I was familiar with this game.
Shannon pointed a finger at my chest, dead-on, like a pistol. “Exactly. What they want is what you have, Natalie.”
“Which is what?”
She smiled and said softly, “Freedom, of course.”
Well then. This was new information. All this time, I’d beenunder the impression that there were only two kinds of women who followed me: liberal women who hated me and good Christian women who loved me. But now I watched with surprise as a third woman opened the door to my brain and sauntered in: young, radical, educated.
“So I’m—what?” I said. “Some kind of catharsis for girls your age?”
“It’s not catharsis,” Shannon said. “It’s more like a road map.” She was speaking with the kind of urgent self-seriousness that only a twenty-year-old can have. “What you’re doing on your farm, with the homesteading and the farm-to-table and the keeping your kids away from technology? Building a business with your husband, and owningallthe means of production, and running it from the comfort of your house? That’s the future, Natalie. That’s the way out.”
“The way out of what?”
“Oh,” she said, like it was obvious. “The maze.”
That was what Shannon and her friends at school called it. The maze. When they went to a job fair and walked past the consulting booth, the military recruitment booth, the law school booth, they would elbow one another and whisper:Step right up,one-way ticket into the heart of the maze.When they sent articles to one another in their group chats, the latest op-ed about the impossibility of affording children as a working mother:This chick is stuck way deep in the maze.
Do you know what young women wanted these days?
Not to be a mother or a worker, at least not in any traditional sense. Certainly not to be both.
What they wanted was to do what I had seemingly done: take one step back, and then another. They wanted to backpedal slowly until they were back at the entrance of the maze, and then to turn around and walk away. To say,I want no part in this,and then to disappear.
What I didn’t say to Shannon: disappearing is an expensive magic trick. Did these girls have the funds to pull it off?
What I said instead was much simpler: “Go on.”
When I got home to the ranch that day, I turned off the car and sat in silence, looking up at my own house, trying to see it through Shannon’s eyes. What had she said about mazes, again? The delivery had been so intoxicating, so impossible to believe—already I was having trouble repeating it to myself. I considered calling Shannon and having her say it to me again, word by word, so I could remember. Instead, I texted her.
You’re hired
A week after her interview, Shannon showed up at the farm with two big suitcases. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she kept saying, after I hugged her in the driveway. “I can’t believe this place isactually real.”
I spread my arms out wide, gave a big twirl, then curtsied. I’d been working, lately, on beingwhimsical.From what I understood, this required saying things likewhoopsie daisies,twirling around in prairie dresses, and throwing my head back and laughing hysterically at things that really weren’t that funny. “On behalf of the mountains and the chickens and cows and the kale and the kids,” I said grandly, “welcome to Yesteryear Ranch.”
