Excerpt from Entangled Thorns

It seems as if it's been years since I've done an excerpt. Here's one from Entangled Thorns.

This is a passage from Chapter 6. Naomi Pritchett Wells is reflecting on her childhood, considering what set her family apart from the other families in Cedar Hollow.

Excerpt:

As children, Beth and I had gazed in awe upon the brick houses of the Haydens and the Poindexters. Three or four times a year Valerie Poindexter invited the children from town to her home for a story hour, and Beth and I attended well past the age I’m sure Valerie had intended.

We sat in a circle with the other children on the brown shag carpet of her living room, working our toes through the thick pile, munching on homemade chocolate chip cookies and drinking grape Kool-Aid while we listened to Valerie read from books that were much too young for us.

On the long walks home, we promised each other that someday we’d have a house as fine as the Poindexter home, with wall-to-wall carpeting and furniture that matched, furniture that wasn’t worn down to the wood on the ends of the arms, the stuffing spilling out of the frayed upholstery.

Built-in glass holders, my father used to say, setting his glass on the exposed wooden frame of the arm, the sweat leaving permanent circular stains on the wood. Ain’t we mighty fine, now! How odd that I just remembered that about my father.

We were poor, but not really much poorer than the majority of the people in Cedar Hollow. What set the Pritchetts apart wasn’t the lack of money. It was harder than that to define. There’s a dignity that often goes along with poverty, a stubborn sense of pride inherent to the American psyche, a refusal to accept charity and an insistence on pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.

That’s what was missing in the Pritchetts; that’s what set us apart from our neighbors. We embraced our chaos and filth and reveled in our reputation as hard-drinking, law-breaking rebels. Upon reflection, I supposed at some point throughout the generations Pritchetts must have realized deviance was all they had, and subsequently decided to embrace it as a point of pride.

Our neighbors were impoverished and dignified; we were trash, and proud of it. That was the difference.