Annie is a little girl who lives on a potato farm with her mother, father, sister, and brother. Her family finds her odd, as she often goes into the woods to play and talk to herself. Her father, Clayton, is a good father, who hates dishonesty, and is a farmer through and through. 

One day Annie tells everyone in the car that she saw God in the woods. Clayton sternly talks to her privately, asking what she saw. She just saw the trees and chickadees. Annie also spends some time with her grandmother, who lives next door and is ready to die. Some nights she spends at Charlene’s house, whose father helps wash them in the bathtub. Compared to Charlene’s family, Annie feels her family is shrouded in shame. She and her brother find a tape recording that shows their mother sobbing to their grandmother about something embarrassing.

One happy day Annie and her father walk down the snowy lane, and Clayton says his family is the most important thing to him. Annie cherishes this memory for a long time — especially when she grows up, leaves home, and becomes an actress all across the world. 

Clayton gets dementia and is placed in a home. He starts spilling secrets about a gay affair he had with the neighbor, Seth Potter. It’s also revealed that Charlene’s father sexually abused her. Annie comes home and starts to see her childhood differently. In the end, she feels she understands her father best of her family members, because they both had a “passion that caused a person to risk everything they had.”