Insist on happiness

How to give thanks in a screwed-up world

This time of year, despite all sorrows, I try to see the world the way my father did.

...Until mid-November, the daily temperatures in Nashville danced around in the 60s and 70s, even hitting 80 from time to time. There were still a few zinnias left in my pollinator garden, and every warm November day the butterflies found them — a beautiful question mark, several gulf fritillaries and cloudless sulphurs, a couple of monarchs, painted lady after painted lady. Not a leaf left on the maple trees, but the garden was full of painted ladies! I kept going outside to look at them. All day long I could not stop smiling.

I wasn't supposed to be happy about this scenario. It should not be 80 degrees in November, even here in the temperate Midsouth. Migrating butterflies like monarchs and painted ladies evolved to travel along a corridor of fall-blooming wildflowers, but wildflowers are mostly gone by November. If not for my zinnias, the butterflies would've starved. "We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator," said the United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, at COP27, the global climate conference, in early November. It was not an overstatement.

And yet I felt so happy about those butterflies, so happy there were still zinnias blooming in my flower beds. It felt wrong to be so happy when happiness arises from a source of great pain, but there I was, feeling both the joy and the pain anyway. My father would have understood...

Mr. Trump, of course, is far from absent. Several adherents of the big lie running to supervise state elections just lost their own elections, and that's a tremendous relief, but election denying is alive and well in the country despite its rebuke at the polls. Gerrymandering efforts to create artificially close elections are not disappearing either.

What voters want is transparently irrelevant to many of the officials charged to represent us, as the attorney general of Kentucky made clear last week. Voters in that state defeated a proposed anti-abortion amendment to its constitution, but the attorney general insists the vote "has no bearing" on its near-total abortion ban. Down here, Mr. Trump's movement is Glenn Close in the bathtub with a knife.

But it's Thanksgiving, and I'm determined not to think about that this week. I will think instead about my father and his insistence on happiness. I will let my whole heart fill up with gratitude for what is still breathtakingly beautiful about this weary, ragged world; for the many people who are fighting for our democracy; and for all the people I love.

I can't force polluting nations to work together to hold climate change to planet-surviving levels. I can't force Congress to work together for solutions to the economic inequities and information silos that separate us. But I can pull out my mother's recipe box and make a Thanksgiving feast. I can remember the loved ones who once shared this table and fill their seats with people whose loved ones are distant or otherwise missing. And I can be grateful for every single fantastic moment we have together.

A hard frost finally came to my garden last week, and the zinnias are gone now, along with all the butterflies. I am sorry to see them go, and I am trying not to interrogate my own gratitude for the days they had here. I tell myself it is not wrong to exult in the beauties that remain. I remind myself of the testimony of my father's whole life, of the truth he taught me — that loss and love will always belong to each other, that sorrow has always been joy's quiet twin. Margaret Renkl