My children think I'm an elitist because I'm happier in Nashville than I was in Greenfield. My son in particular thinks we're bragging about how well we've made it in the big city when we tell folks 'back home' how we're doing. I don't blame them, really. They have no concept of what kind of struggle it was to stay out of bankruptcy court. They haven't yet figured out that we could never have afforded college educations for them the way things were - that we were (and still are) paying off our own student loans which have been in default more times than I care to admit, mostly because when it came to putting food in their bellies or paying the bills, I made sure that they ate. As for the bragging, it's what you do when you come from a family that wasn't well respected in the community and when you were never expected to amount to anything. Yes, my father-in-law served as a police officer in that lovely little hamlet, but it got him no respect. I don't know if it was his brother Charles' success that made people look down on Bob, or his decision to join the military and move away, or what exactly. But he never belonged in Greenfield. Neither did my husband, and I certainly didn't. And if the kids felt they belonged,that's their perception. I saw them shut out of things more often than they were accepted. But I'm not an elitist. I look around the town with sadness, wishing that there was some miracle that could pull these folks out the squalor. I wish the kids had more to look forward to than a job at the plant or the sewing factory or the local quick stop. I wish the girls didn't think pregnancy was a rite of passage that somehow comes with the territory. I wish more of them could get the education they need to find the solutions to these problems. But as it stands, as long as there are teachers who don't know the proper usage of "an" in front of the word umbrella and who would argue the point, I stand my ground. Moving to Nashville was the best thing I could have done for my kids. And that doesn't make me elitist.