Shannon showed me a rough cut of the footage a few hours later. The video was exactly like the other ones I’d done in recent months, only 20 percent better. Somehow, the light in the room looked rarefied, almost grainy; you could see flecks of dust floating through a stripe of sunbeam, my fingers moving in and out of the light. It looked like how piano sounded; soft, natural, meticulous.
“What do you think?”
“It’s really good,” I admitted.
“I thought you’d say that,” she said coolly.
There was that strange sensation again: the feeling of sitting on a seesaw with this young woman. Up, down, up.
I didn’t fire her that day, obviously. The next morning, I woke up certain again that she needed to leave, and again, she was armed with an idea by the time I arrived downstairs.
“Want to film some content by the chicken coop?”
We went out to the chicken coop. I muttered my usualHello, ladies,and she said, “Why don’t you say that on camera?”
I looked at her. “Say what?”
“What you just said.Hello, ladies.”
“You don’t think that’s a bit … kitsch?”
Shannon shrugged. “I think it would perform well.”
It did. It performed very well.
The next day, Shannon said we should try to incorporate the children into content more often. “Your baking tutorials are so good, but I think we could add a more organic, homey element if the children were actually involved, rather than floating around in the periphery.”
“It’s not going to work,” I said. “I’ve tried.”
I explained to Shannon how ungovernable the children were whenever I tried to film them, how quickly Clementine’s mood would shift from interested to bored to infuriated, how she had once thrown an entire bowl of flour across the kitchen, causing the ceramic to shatter.
“Let’s try it,” Shannon said. “Humor me. Just once.”
“All right,” I said. “Just once.”
And so we recorded a mother-daughter blueberry-pie-from-scratch tutorial, and I did my best to keep a smile pushpinned on my face while Clementine and Jessa cawed and cackled and screeched around me like a pair of crows.
“Do you see?” I said desperately over the sound of Jessa’s sudden wails. (Shewanted to crack the egg, but Clementine had already cracked it.) “This has been a disaster.”
“Actually, I think we’re getting great footage,” Shannon said. “Keep going.”
Again, she was right: the next morning, a twenty-second edit of peaceful motherhood arrived in my inbox. It was almost infuriating, how much better Shannon’s videos were than mine. I’d thought my photo and video content was well-done, but now I could see how amateur it really was. A conundrum, indeed: I wanted the world to see Yesteryear Ranch through my eyes, but everything looked better through Shannon’s gaze than my own.
At the end of the week, we pulled Clementine out of her homeschooling lesson after lunch so that we could use her in a picnic video on the hillside, a perfect mother-daughter moment right as the afternoon light went drippy and golden. At first, Shannon had hesitated at the thought of taking Clementine from class. “Doesn’t she need to … learn, or whatever?”
Three months from now, I would twitch at a comment like this. I would physically struggle to resist the urge to laugh and say lightly,Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black, little miss dropout?
But on that day I didn’t think twice. “It’s totally fine,” I said breezily. “Really, the children get so much one-on-one attention that all of them are testing years ahead. If Clementine ever went to public school, she’d be several grades beyond her peers.”
It would be wrong to say Clementine was a disobedient little girl. She was very obedient, she did her chores and helped her younger siblings and rarely complained, except for the one request she refused to ever accommodate for me: a smile. But with Shannon that afternoon, Clementine smiled nonstop. She even laughed at some of Shannon’s jokes. The footage from that day would become some of our most evergreen content, repurposed again and again: somehow, Shannon filmed us at an angle to make it look like Clementine was smiling and laughing with me.
After filming was done we sat on the hillside and ate cheese and crackers, watching the sun go down. At one point Clementine stood up to go collect wildflowers; she wanted to make a crown. While she plucked stems nearby, I turned to Shannon and said, “You thought we did all this alone, didn’t you?”
She turned to look at me. “Yeah, I did.”
I tried to give her a reasonable look. A you-couldn’t-understand-because-you’re-not-yet-a mother look. “No one can do all of this alone.”
“But,” she said, then stopped.
