The Flowers and the Thorns

Cedar Valley News
May 19, 2026
The Flowers and the Thorns
By George Khan

A woman counted out her change on my counter this morning.

She is a regular. She buys the same sandwich on the same day. This morning she set down a five and went into her coin purse for the rest, counting it in dimes and nickels while the line waited behind her. She was not embarrassed. She was being careful in a way she did not used to have to be.

I see this every day now. The order made smaller. The extra thing put back. The young father who used to buy Saturday lunch for himself and his boy now buys one sandwich and cuts it in half.

I am not going to tell you the squeeze is not real. It is real. It is on my counter every morning. It is in my own wholesale invoices, which have not stopped climbing in five years. The nightly news says the country is in its worst mood in seventy-four years, and it is not lying. The number is the number.

But I want to tell you something I have noticed about the nightly news.

The nightly news watches thorns for a living. A fire, a closure, a falling number, a fight. It is very good at finding the thorn in any garden, and holds it to the camera every night at six. What it almost never does is turn the camera ten degrees and show you the rest of the garden. It has rose blinders. It sees only the thing with a point on it.

I read further than the news at six. Not because I am clever. Because a man who runs a small business learns to read more than one report.

Here is what is in the other reports. The people who study the economy for a living are not as unified as the man at six o’clock makes them sound. Many look at the same country and use words you will not hear on the broadcast. Words like steady. Words like sound. Small business confidence went up last month, not down. The job market, the people who measure it say, is holding. Growth is slow, but growth is not a fire. None of it makes the squeeze a lie. Both things are in the same garden. The thorn is real. So is the part the camera does not turn to find.

I have run this deli for thirty-one years. I have watched two kinds of people walk through the door.

One kind comes in and sees the thorns. The prices, the line, the thing gone wrong, the reason today will be hard. They are not wrong. The thorns are there. Every word they say is true.

The other kind sees the flowers. The same prices, the same line, the same hard day. But they notice the boy did get his half a sandwich. They notice the woman behind them quietly covered the dimes. They notice it is spring outside the window. They are not wrong either. The flowers are there too.

It is the same garden. The same town, the same week, the same economy. The two kinds of people are not seeing different worlds. They are seeing two true halves of one world, and choosing which half to carry out the door.

I want to be careful, because this is not a trick. I am not telling you the thorns are imaginary. I have been cut. My invoices have cut me. I am telling you something smaller and truer. A person gets a say. A small one. You get to aim your eyes. And what a man looks at first, morning after morning, is in the end what he becomes.

The woman finished counting her change. She got her sandwich. She said thank you, the same as always, and will be back next week. In a hard year, it is not nothing.

Tomorrow you will get up and look at the garden. It will have thorns in it. It always does. It will have flowers in it. It always does. Which one you reach for first is, more than the news will admit, up to you.

Tell us on the Facebook page what you reached for.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us what you reached for this week — the thorn you could not help seeing, or the flower you found beside it. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the record-low consumer sentiment readings, the rise in small business confidence, and the labor market and growth assessments referenced are real.

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