Craftsman & Cottage: The Streetcar Suburb Style

Lyrics

On Mayson Avenue, the house still stands.
A hundred years have settled in its bones of wood.
A statement made by long-forgotten hands.
And it is good.

It likely arrived here on a freight train.
A catalogue promise from Sears, a mail-order plan.
Numbered two-by-fours, stacked against the rain.
The measured work of a practical man.
Built for a clerk who'd ride the new electric line,
Joel Hurt's five-cent track, a most elegant design for escaping town.

This is the Craftsman's logic, plain and true.
The honest shelter of a low-slung roof.
Tapered columns on a foundation of river rock and brick.
A wide front porch, for the simple, clever trick
of catching a breeze when the humid day is through.

Its sleeping porch offered a truce with the August heat.
Its double-hung windows have framed a changing street.
The porch swing held the quiet weight of debt and time,
of small defeats and victories sublime.
It was a sturdy, well-made box to hold a life,
the Sunday quiet, the daily, common strife.

This is the Craftsman's logic, plain and true.
The honest shelter of a low-slung roof.
Tapered columns on a foundation of river rock and brick.
A wide front porch, for the simple, clever trick
of catching a breeze when the humid day is through.

The rafter tails still pattern the late sun.
A practical beauty, now the building's done.
The streetcar's gone, its ghost is in the air.
The neighborhood moves on, without a care.
But the house just settles, unimpressed and square.
It has the solid virtue of just being there.

A single porch light clicks on against the dark.
A floorboard sighs.
It's made its mark.