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The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.
This observation from Chapter 11 comes from the moment when Lara first mentions Joe as a romantic interest in her stories about Duke. She notices that her daughters, who were starting to grow restless and disaffected with her narrative, gain a new sense of focus when she mentions their father. Duke’s story has grown troubling, but Nell, Emily, and Maisie have the evidence of Lara and Joe’s happy ending right in front of them. Lara's recognition of this preference also points to how her children settle into unconsciously repeating their behaviors and choices now that they’re home at Three Sisters Orchards. The family have retreated to the “familiar story” of the cherry farm to escape the new and terrifying world ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic.
When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls.
This moment from Chapter 3 illustrates the overlap of past and present within the Nelson house, which Lara is both creating through her stories and seeing in real time. As the others in the house settle down to sleep, Lara performs the familiar parental duty of checking in on everyone before she goes to bed herself. As she goes to Nell and Maisie’s room, Lara is surprised to see her daughters simultaneously in their childhood and adult forms. They are exactly where they slept as children, and Lara can see their younger, smaller shapes alongside their adult bodies with painful clarity. It reminds her of the uncounted times she has walked this same nighttime path as a mother, reinforcing Lara’s sense that time has ceased to mean anything.
In that sense the past is much like the present because the present—this unparalleled disaster—is the happiest time of my life: Joe and I here on this farm, our three girls grown and gone and then returned, all of us working together to take the cherries off the trees. Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.
In this passage from Chapter 18, Lara reflects on her life's trajectory as a whole and comes to the conclusion that in 2020, she’s actually the happiest she has ever been. Even if for everyone else in the world the present is an “unparalleled disaster,” Lara has her children and the love of her life gathered around her on their beautiful farm, safe from harm and working together. She also realizes that her younger self could not have predicted finding fulfillment in this sort of situation, which confirms that ‘2020 Lara’ is an almost entirely different woman than ‘Tom Lake Lara.’ This transformation is reinforced by the shift in pronouns Lara makes here. Instead of referring to her younger self as “I” or “me,” she thinks of her as “the girl who left Tom Lake.” The return of her daughters to the farm also mirrors Lara’s own journey there and back, adding in yet another cycle of departure and return.
