Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 50

This land is not how I remember it. Or rather—this land is not how I imagined it. How many times did I walk through these snowy woods, in the years and years I lived on this farm?

None, is the true answer. Not one time.

It goes by so fast. That’s what you’re supposed to say when someone, or something, forces you to consider all the horrible time-management mistakes you made as a parent, all the birthdays you forgot, all the beautiful moments that you attended, yes, but weren’t really there for.

What can I say? It goes by so fast. You blink and they’re grown, out of the house, gone.

It’s true. I blinked and they were gone.

Clementine, the child who made me a mother, and Samuel and Stetson, my darling young men. And Jessa, our resident firecracker! And Junebug—well, I hadn’t spent enough time with her to find her personality shorthand. Each additional child fell a little further away from me. When I try to conjure their faces now, it’s only Clementine’s I can see perfectly. If I think hard enough, I can manage the rough outlines of the boys—but Jessa and Junebug? They’re not memories so much as they are ideas. Ancient hieroglyphs painted along the far walls of my mind.

As I move through the leaves, tracing my fingers along the parchment-paper feel of birch branches and the calcified wrinkles of maple trunks, I think of all the charcoal sketches of my life. All the things I meant to do and didn’t.

I meant to learn Junebug’s personality. I meant to walk through these woods. Meant to go fishing in our river with the boys; to pocket salmon by the handful and then lie out on the sun-warmed rocks and listen to the rushing water. I meant to turn off my phone. I meant to revive the old apple orchard I’d been so excited about when we first bought the property. I meant to actually learn about farming, and to actually learn how to grow things, not just a child or an Instagram account but a carrot, a calf, a sapling. I meant to have a media empire. Magazines and a television show and a big office in some faraway city. I meant to have sprawling gardens, acres of them, all around the ranch. Meant to know the name of every wildflower native to Idaho. Meant to learn about herbal medicines, tonics, and tinctures. I meant to meet more people in person— really I did, I was nearly ready —but then I blinked and I was gone.

Which is to say: this, right now, is the first time I have ever walked through these woods. Nothing is recognizable to me, not the small mole-like trio of boulders I stumble past, or the sloping, wide curve of this trail. I feel no flickering sense of déjà vu in this forest, no shutter-click of confusion, the way I do when I look at the children, the horse, the barn.

This forest has never been mine.

I walk for what feels like a very long time. The snow soaks through my boots, and before long my toes are stinging with cold. Eventually I see it. Just barely visible in the distance through the trees: a small log cabin. Strange: the trail I’m on seems to be taking me away from it. Maybe it will loop me around on the other side, but suddenly I feel pressed for time, and so I cut off the trail and half walk, half trot straight toward it. My feet are completely numb, and I keep stumbling and tripping on roots, and then soon I am standing in front of the cabin in the middle of a large, man-made clearing, and that is when I see it, just barely visible behind the cabin: metallic, unnatural blue.

I hear myself whisper—no, whimper—aloud, like I am a child, like I am just now being born again: “Truck.”

Smoke is rising from the chimney. Above the front door, a word is etched into the doorframe: MANOSPHERE .

So this is where the men go.