Bungalows & Shotguns: Homes That Echo History

Lyrics

I see you.
Just off Flat Shoals, where the noise dies down.
The streetlights make your windows look like eyes.
You remember everything, don't you?

You with your wide eaves, your low-pitched roof.
A Craftsman, built from a catalog dream in nineteen-twenty.
Tapered columns holding up the porch.
I can almost smell the new-cut pine,
hear the hammer tapping nails from a pattern book page.
A promise of a life, bought and paid for.

And your neighbor, the shotgun house.
A straight shot from the front door to the back garden.
No secrets in that layout.
Built for the people who laid the tracks, who worked the mills.
One room deep, a hundred years long.
A simple breath held in narrow walls.

But it's the porch. It's always the porch.
The space between the private and the known.
Where the mail was left, where goodbyes were said.
This wood has held the weight of summer evenings,
the silence of a thousand Mondays.
And sometimes, if I listen close, I can hear the ghost of a bell.
The old streetcar, rounding the corner.

The honeysuckle on the trellis is new, but the scent is old.
Same as it was when they read the paper here,
the newsprint smudging their fingers.
Now a kid with a pierced lip and a 529 wristband sits on the same steps,
scrolling through a glowing screen.
The porch doesn't judge. It just holds the space.

All the lives stacked up inside you.
Like layers of wallpaper, one on top of the other.
The first cry of a baby in the front room.
The silence after the door closed for the last time.
Your floorboards know the weight of every footstep.
You are the archive. You are the proof.

The porch swing moves in the breeze.
Still watching. Still waiting.
Just off Glenwood.
You remember.