Likely Stories - Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Welcome back to Likely Stories. I’m Paige Connell, an English teacher at Midway High School with a story that explores the idea of “be careful what you wish for” to the extreme.

In “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke, we follow a mega influencer intent on crafting the perfect content who gets more than she bargains for when she wakes up one
morning ACTUALLY transported to the days of yore, where survival is not aided by
producers, nannies, and hired hands, but by her own two hands, where organic,
home-cooked meals don’t appear after a camera cut, and where a family is not content to smile for the photo shoot but instead feels distant and unfamiliar.

Natalie Heller Mills seems to have a perfect life, if you look through the filter of her social media account, @YesteryearRanch. Her husband Caleb is hapless but finds
purpose in running a farm, and their 5 picture-perfect children generate tons of
likes-if you don't care about their personal consent. Natalie is a trad wife, fully
embracing traditional family values and practices. But when a scandal rocks her world, she awakens to find herself on her farm, but NOT her farm. With her husband and children, but NOT her husband and children. Everything is just a shade off of normal, and the normal, day-to-day life that Natalie has worked so hard to curate online is gone in a click, replaced by back-breaking manual labor and the unforgiving wilderness.

Whether it is hauling water, cooking from actual scratch, gathering eggs, avoiding predators, fitting into this new family, and figuring out what in the world is going on, Natalie is written in such a way that you find her to be equal parts sympathetic and maddening. It is so frustrating that she doesn’t understand how she’s ended up in this confusing new world, but at the same time, how can a woman who makes a living under the guise of traditional living really not know how to cook an egg?

Alternating the present confusion with the former pleasant reality, we see all the fractures in the facade that led Natalie to this moment. She is, at her foundation,
an unlikeable character, but she possesses the fortitude to be the driving force in
her own life. Weaving back and forth in time will keep you wondering, but the
revelation will have you rethinking that desire to go back to the simple times.

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