Early Shops: Corner Store Echoes

Lyrics

I can almost see you.
Standing on the corner of Glenwood and Flat Shoals.
Before the amps, before the neon glow.
Just a wooden door and a window full of dust motes.

The floors smelled of sawdust and coffee grounds.
Burlap sacks of flour leaning near the counter.
Apothecary jars with their paper labels,
promising cures for winter coughs.
The proprietor, his name lost to the census pages,
wiping the long wooden surface clean,
waiting for the 9 a.m. bell.

And the world turned on the trolley's arrival.
A metallic clang and a sigh of brakes.
The village heart wasn't a stage or a speaker,
it was the nickel you saved for a piece of taffy.
It was the news exchanged on a wooden bench,
just corner store echoes, for goodness sakes.

The motorman waved from his open-air car in July.
Same face, same time, every morning.
Children sent with a list clutched in a small hand.
"Don't forget the change," a mother's warning.
And they'd wait on that bench, watching the barber pole spin,
red and white and blue, a slow, hypnotic story.

And the world turned on the trolley's arrival.
A metallic clang and a sigh of brakes.
The village heart wasn't a stage or a speaker,
it was the nickel you saved for a piece of taffy.
It was the news exchanged on a wooden bench,
just corner store echoes, for goodness sakes.

Then the hum grew quieter.
The tracks got buried under asphalt and time.
The shops boarded up one by one.
A different kind of silence settled in,
a long, patient quiet...
waiting for a different kind of rhyme.
Waiting for the drums to begin.

But before the grit, there was just the grain.
Before the riffs, just the rain on the window pane.
Just a corner store echo.
Fading now.