The Farmer's Daughter

Along the dust roads that run at various angles off the highways of central Missouri, there are hundreds of houses which look like this one. The tenant farmers who occupy them…always have little children who play around the houses while the grownups work the fields. Even when the women folk are in the kitchen, the children of these places look lonely, lonely like the places themselves. The little girl who works the pump is doing so, “just because.” For the moment there is nothing else to do. —Benton