The farmer kneels down. He only wants to help. But the second his hand comes near, the rabbit explodes, clawing, biting, throwing everything it has left at the one person trying to save it. It isn't cruelty. It's terror. The rabbit can't tell a rescuing hand from the thing that hurt it. Every reach looks like one more attack.

One of the most painful aspects of hard seasons is that we cannot see them clearly while we are living inside them. We are too close. The grief is too loud. The fear takes up too much space. And so we interpret our circumstances with whatever emotional vocabulary is available to us in that moment, which is usually limited to words like failing, stuck, lost, forgotten.

Some years, Thanksgiving doesn’t arrive wrapped in Norman Rockwell scenes and Instagram-perfect gatherings.