Lamb in His Bosom Book

I was at Trader Joe's this morning and the cashier asked me what were my plans for the day. I told her I was going to finish my errands, then go home and settle in with a book. She asked me the title, I said "Lamb in His Bosom" and she gave me a blank stare. I told her it was about the settlers in the backwoods of Georgia before the Civil War. Another blank stare, then she told me she preferred books with drama.

Drama? Drama? I should have told her I planned to go home and dive back into this novel of what it took to survive in those years. You want drama, try building a home and a farm with nothing but your own strength and knowledge of how to get it done. Try giving birth to 13 children, not all of whom survive. Try killing a panther after one of those births just minutes after delivering your child alone, when you're too weak to lift the gun, but do it anyway to protect your child. Try dealing with drought, sickness, hunger, danger, all brought to you courtesy of daily life when hard work was all you could count on. Birth, death, young love, old age, it's all here. Drama with a capital D.

The dialect in the mouths of these characters is a form of poetry, although it's not often used. The story is told in narrative form, in rich, simple terms, using old words I heard my grandmother use.
Touchous, mought (for might), sploundered (a fainting spell), nighabout, and a phrase I used to love: root hog or die pore, meaning you have to work hard for what you get.

"A woman has business to be as strong as a man. A man don't mind laying the ax between a calf's eyes; a woman does mind, and has to stand by and watch it done. A man fathers a little un, but a woman feels it shove up against her heart, and beat on her body, and drag on her with it's weight. A woman has to be stronger than a man".

I hate to leave this world and the people I grew to love, but one of the truly wonderful things about books is that you can return to these places any time you wish. This one will be reopened many times.