No. I haven’t jumped ahead to Christmas. I am fully aware that today is Thanksgiving. Painfully aware most of the time.

The day we celebrate as Thanksgiving is such a complicated day for so many, and for me. Even without the personal struggles that so many of us (myself included) face as the holiday onslaught of images of perfect families and perfect houses and perfect lives flood our way, there are the cultural struggles that we face as we work our way through the mythology of “America” to something closer to a truthful history of the taking of this land. I survive all of this internal complexity by holding tight to the sentiments of that spiritual that I have so often sung, Let Us Break Bread Together, a song that carries in both the kind of hospitality and humility that we all need so very much these days.

There is something else, however, that gets me through the day, and now I’m going to share my secret with you. Well, it may not be a secret, you may have them in your yard too. Maybe you don’t notice, though, maybe they just seem like the faded remains of summer. Not to me. To me, the neighborhood is awash with a little miracle that I call the Thanksgiving rose.

I remember the first time that I saw them. I had just moved to DC, I had only been here for three or four months. I was walking down East Capitol Street toward a friends house, and I passed the intersection of 6th and East Capitol SE. There, in a corner garden, were 20, maybe 30, rose bushes in full bloom. And there among them stood an older woman who I would come to know as Marie. Marie had one of the largest gardens on the Hill, and every single inch of ground was planted in rose bushes. And there I stood in late November, staring at the most beautiful pink and red and orange flowers. There were so many flowers in bloom that it might have been spring, not Thanksgiving. This Midwesterner had never seen anything like it.

Marie is gone these 20+ years later, and her house has been sold and only a few of the bushes remain. But as I walk the streets of my neighborhood each morning in November, I still find roses blooming everywhere, some, at the end of their season, and some struggling valiantly forward producing new blooms and stretching toward the light which shines less and less brightly as the angle of the sun moves towards winter.

And so, on this Thanksgiving evening, in this complicated year of 2021, I offer to you all, my Thanksgiving roses. May there be beauty for you among the thorns of life, and may you have time to stop and gaze upon it for just a while.