A Girl’s Garden Randall Thompson

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself
And he said, "Why not?"

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood
And he said, "Just it."

And he said, "That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm."

It was not enough of a garden
Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand
But she don't mind now

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load