Gratitude is a strange emotion to wrestle with in a country that still insists on telling a sanitized Thanksgiving story. We recite the familiar script — a shared harvest, a peaceful gathering — while stepping neatly around the violence that followed. The Wampanoag extended knowledge and hospitality to newcomers who would later drive them from their own land. That tension, that deliberate forgetting, sits quietly beneath the holiday table.

This year, gratitude found me in an unglamorous place: in a police parking lot on Thanksgiving night. My father-in-law had hit debris on his drive home. My husband was sick. My sister was closest and went first; I followed. This is what my family does — no hesitation, just movement. There’s a steadiness in that kind of love, the kind that meets you in t

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