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rissaleighs 's review for:
Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman
by Mary Mann Hamilton
This book is an autobiography by a woman who was born in 1866, and among the first of the settlers in the forests and swamps of the Mississippi Delta. What a life! The Hamilton family was pummeled by misfortune, and yet the author has such grit and determination that it reads like a gripping adventure story.
The scene that will stay with me is that of the flood--picture standing on a tall stump as the water rises around you and two of your children, losing hope that the canoe will come back for you before it's too late, and having a bear swim right past you on its way to higher ground!
For a "pioneer" story, I was surprised by how viscerally familiar it felt. The Mississippi she writes of 120+ years ago does not seem that far off the present. Though to be fair, I did spend a year in the not too distant past living in a comparatively unplumbed, unheated log cabin underneath the Mississippi long leaf pines. I, too, have laid in bed listening to ice-laden branches overhead and wondering if they were going to come through the roof. Or that evening I sat in the bathtub of that disintegrating toothpick house hugging my pillow as two tornados tracked by at the same time, one a couple miles north and the other a couple miles south. I wonder if all modern day Mississippians would find Mary's story as immediately recognizable? Or was my time there just unusually rugged for the modern era?
The scene that will stay with me is that of the flood--picture standing on a tall stump as the water rises around you and two of your children, losing hope that the canoe will come back for you before it's too late, and having a bear swim right past you on its way to higher ground!
For a "pioneer" story, I was surprised by how viscerally familiar it felt. The Mississippi she writes of 120+ years ago does not seem that far off the present. Though to be fair, I did spend a year in the not too distant past living in a comparatively unplumbed, unheated log cabin underneath the Mississippi long leaf pines. I, too, have laid in bed listening to ice-laden branches overhead and wondering if they were going to come through the roof. Or that evening I sat in the bathtub of that disintegrating toothpick house hugging my pillow as two tornados tracked by at the same time, one a couple miles north and the other a couple miles south. I wonder if all modern day Mississippians would find Mary's story as immediately recognizable? Or was my time there just unusually rugged for the modern era?