Cabbagetown Reunion: Coming Home Again

Lyrics

First Saturday in October.
The air in Cabbagetown Park feels… thinner.
Like a veil you could almost push aside.
And see all the years at once.
Over there, by the Storytelling Tent, that's Martha Mae Henderson.
Born right here, when the air was thick with cotton dust and boiling greens.
She sat there last year, I think it was October twelfth, three in the afternoon…
Telling stories of her grandmother's hands at the loom.
The rhythmic clatter that shook the floorboards on Tye Street.
And the great brick wall of the Mill just watches.
It remembers her grandmother. It watches us now.
Same sun on the same red brick.
And this is it, isn't it? The coming home.
Not to a house, but to a feeling held in the space between the oaks.
The old threads and the new threads, pulled tight for just one day.
The Cabbagetown Reunion.
We’re all just coming home again.
Leo Ramirez has his booth set up near the community garden.
He lives up there now, in the mill, where the looms used to scream.
His spray paint cans hiss a different kind of song.
He’s painting the mill stacks on a piece of reclaimed wood.
And Tom Miller just finished setting up the bluegrass stage,
Tuning a fiddle that sounds as old as the hills these people came from.
He makes sure the sound carries all the way to Carroll Street.
And this is it, isn't it? The coming home.
Not to a house, but to a feeling held in the space between the oaks.
The old threads and the new threads, pulled tight for just one day.
The Cabbagetown Reunion.
We’re all just coming home again.
There's no cabbage boiling now.
Just the smell of grilled corn and craft beer.
No one remembers the yarn bomb on the fence from that one year.
A new kind of weaving. A joke on the ghost of the looms.
We tell the stories so we don't forget the sound.
So we don’t forget the cost.
We stand on the ground that held them.
Martha Mae is laughing at something Leo just said.
The sun is catching the dust motes in the air.
Another year woven.
Another year held.
See you next October.