I wonder if it’s Iowa,

Or all the world around,

Where mud’s the sort of substance,

By Carolyn Beachy

I wonder if it’s Iowa,

Or all the world around,

Where mud’s the sort of substance,

In which play can be found.

The mud here is unusual,

So gooey it invites,

A child to wallow in it and

Experience it’s delights.

Why, just the other week I saw

My garden freshly tilled,

And turned into a mud hole,

With water freshly spilled.

Then people I won’t dare to name,

Decided to partake,

In playing in the slimy slime,

The big, brown, muddy lake.

They sat in it and loved it,

They took a run and SPLAT!

They landed and the spatter flew,

Like diving in a vat.

The mud balls were so nicely shaped,

And thrown with lots of flair,

They landed with a heavy thud,

On arms and legs and hair.

The mud was oozing through their toes,

Indeed, from every pore,

they blended with the mud as one,

Yet they came back for more.

I have another memory,

When I was just a child,

Of brothers swimming in the pond,

All mud covered and wild.

They’d paint themselves and take a run

From far away and SPLASH!

They went in brown and came up white-

A mud and swimming bash.

I too, would hunt in my Mom’s stash,

For pie pans when I’d bake,

My mud pies in the sun outside,

Mud cookies and mud cake.

Our world is full of many toys,

For young and old alike,

We spend our bucks and dream of more

Toys that come down the pike.

We surf the seas and ride the roads,

And fly the skies with stuff,

Designed to give unusual thrills,

And say, “That’s not enough!”

We look at catalogs and drool

At toys depicted there,

We roam the malls and store’s long halls,

A pleasure seeker’s lair.

We overtax our credit cards,

All in the name of fun.

When we could have completely free,

Soft, wet earth by the ton-

Raw material, right at hand,

To cause us to create,

Fun unsurpassed by costly things,

And fully satiate

Our need to beat the other guy,

With hobbies so outlandish,

All that it takes is slimy mud

And they’ll say, “Unverstandich!”

But more than that, they’ll want to try,

And see what they can do,

To use this natural resource,

In ways, novel and new.

‘Til all the world will know no debt,

Pursuing costly pleasures,

Because they find that mud indeed,

Is one of fun’s free treasures.