Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
•••
November in Minnesota carries its own kind of fire. Not the blaze of summer bonfires, but the quieter glow that settles in the corners of a house — across oak floors, along windows where the cold presses in, in the hush that arrives earlier each evening as the daylight thins. It’s a month that nudges us inward, toward whatever or whoever feels most like warmth.
Thanksgiving sits inside this season like an ember. Not a spectacle, but a pause — a hearthstone moment — something you lean toward instinctively when the year has been long. A threshold between what was meant and what was held.
A few weeks ago, outside a Kowalski’s parking lot, I watched a woman drop a bag of Honeycrisp apples. They scattered everywhere, rolling under cars, bumping against the curb, bright red against the black pavement. Before I could move, an older man stepped toward her. He didn’t rush. He knelt on the cold concrete and gathered the apples one by one, brushing each clean with the sleeve of his coat. The two of them worked quietly — strangers, briefly sharing a small circle of warmth in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
Emerson once wrote that “the world is upheld by the veracity of good men.” Watching those two strangers, one kneeling, one relieved, I understood exactly what Emerson meant. A great deal of the world is held together by people who act decently when no one is watching.
When the last apple was back in the bag, they exchanged a soft, almost shy smile — the kind people offer when something decent interrupts the pace of the day — and then they went on with their errands.
That moment stayed with me. Perhaps because it felt like a modern hearth: the warmth created when ordinary hands meet an ordinary need. No spotlight. No applause. Just presence.
