Foreword written by Byron Crawford

"Of all the splendid writers who have looked into Kentucky's eyes since Daniel Boone and the long hunters found this place, most have not understood her.

"David and Eulalie "Lalie" Dick looked into Kentucky's eyes and saw clear through to her soul.

"Kentucky is a beautiful but complex land. The energy hidden beneath her eastern mountains fired America's industrial revolution and warmed a young nation. The timber from her magnificent forests helped build many of American's great buildings, the foremost of which was the humble log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln spent his earliest years. The water from her limestone springs and the bluegrass from her rolling pastures have nourished the finest thoroughbreds ever saddled for the Sport of Kings.

"Yet the essence of this good place eludes most journalists because they never really take time to know her - as David and Lalie Dick have done - from the inside out.

"David and Lalie have sat with her whittlers and storytellers around her pot-bellied stoves in her old country stores; have meandered down her back roads, rested in her rocking chairs, and visited on her front porches.

"David and Lalie have listened to Kentucky's heartbeat and to her whispers and her laughter from Majestic in the east to Madrid Bend in the west. They have read her moods, seen her hidden tears, and understood her dreams.

"That is why David's many books, his wonderful essays from Plum Lick in Kentucky Living, and Lalie's popular columns in the Kentucky Farm Bureau's newspaper, All Around Kentucky, ring as dear and true to most Kentuckians as a grandmother's old dinner bell on a high summer day in the long ago.

" 'If you really love Kentucky,' a woman in the hills once said, 'Kentucky will take care of you.'

"David and Lalie Dick have done Kentucky proud, and the Commonwealth has embraced their work.

"We who have read their books and periodic essays have come to admire and love them not only as fine wordsmiths, but as friends and neighbors with whom we could enjoy an afternoon conversation at a corner fence post, across the garden gate, or under a shade tree in the yard.

"If all of Kentucky's children were as gifted with the pen as David and Lalie Dick, surely our libraries and our lives would be richer by volumes. But those of us who cannot find words to express our affection for this place must look to such writers as David and Lalie, who have captured many of our own sentiments in the pages of Home Sweet Kentucky.

"In that sense, their book is really our book - and it lives up to its name from cover to cover.