payment page
I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.
This quotation from Chapter 17 concerns Lara’s moral qualms about telling the story of her life to her daughters. As they sit there in front of her, she feels intense pride and admiration for them, but she also has to deal with her own ego, especially her selfish desire to have them see her in a favorable light. In order to protect them, she feels she probably needs to tell them the unvarnished truth, but doing so would risk disillusioning them about her being a good and moral person, so she doesn’t feel that she can. Lara acknowledges that these desires “do not neatly coexist,” pointing out the tension between wanting her daughters to be happy with her and wanting them to be happy in general. Lara is realizing here that the rewards of raising accomplished children, including having honest and open communication, are balanced by the risk of vulnerability and disillusionment.
I don’t remember ever looking at my mother this way, like I could eat her down to the bone then wipe my bloody mouth on her hair.
Lara thinks this alarming sentence in Chapter 3 when she’s remembering how Emily was as a teenager, particularly during their squabbles around Emily’s parentage. The frightening imagery of Emily looking at her like she could “eat her down to the bone” makes Lara feel angry and defensive. Emily has decided that Duke is her real father based on made-up evidence. Because she’s unhappy at Three Sisters Orchards, she leans into the fantasy as a way of escaping her home life. Emily is an intelligent, creative kid and Lara is very proud of her, but at the same time she finds her daughter exhausting and irritating. It’s another moment where Lara feels like her children’s needs outweigh her capacity, and she wonders whether she ever made her mother feel the same. The reader sees their intense love and connection awkwardly balanced against the erosion of Lara’s boundaries.
We can see everything from here. I would say that there has never been such a beautiful day, but I say that all the time. I can see how right Duke was. He only needed such a little space. There is room up here for all of us, for me and for Joe and our daughters, for their partners and their children, because this is the thing about youth: You change your mind. Despite everything we know there may still be children living on this farm and someday they will be buried here with us.
In this passage from Chapter 21, Lara broods about the future of Three Sisters Orchards and the possibility of her daughters choosing to continue their legacy. It’s both a joyful and a painful moment, as she acknowledges Emily’s desire to be childless and balances it with her assurance that young people change their minds. This realization links the themes of the uneven rewards of parenthood and of repeating cycles. While Lara can feel the joy of envisioning a shared future with her children, it is tempered by the understanding that they will make their own choices, and she might not like them. She realizes that all of the energy she pours into navigating her family’s troubles will be given back to her in one way or another, and that all the Nelsons will end up “buried here with us.”
