Front Porch Light: Edgewood's Enduring Embrace

Lyrics

[Intro]
Dusk settles on Edgewood Avenue.
And you come on.
Just a simple click.

[Verse 1]
I imagine you first...
Nineteen-ten, maybe.
A single incandescent bulb against the dark.
A welcome for someone coming home on Joel Hurt's last streetcar.
Shining on the fresh paint of a Craftsman porch,
on the wooden columns,
on the sleeping porch screen door,
catching honeysuckle in your yellow glow.

[Chorus]
You don't tell the story.
You just hold the light.
Through the quiet years, through the roaring change.
A steady, silent promise on the porch.
You just burn.

[Verse 2]
Then the streetcars fell silent.
The tracks pulled up.
You burned through the long, quiet evenings of the sixties, the seventies.
Shining on chipped paint,
on kids playing in the street until the sky turned purple.
A beacon for a different kind of tired.
A different kind of hope.
Just the same warm light on the faded house numbers.

[Chorus]
You don't tell the story.
You just hold the light.
Through the quiet years, through the roaring change.
A steady, silent promise on the porch.
You just burn.

[Bridge]
Now the bulb is LED. A cooler white.
And the path that was iron is pavement and laughter.
The BeltLine breathes a new rhythm past the yard.
You shine on cyclists with blinking red lights,
on new neighbors talking on their phones,
on the ghost sign for a bakery that's been gone eighty years.
You catch it all in your steady gaze.
The old hum and the new.

[Outro]
The click off, the click on.
Generation to generation.
The welcome mat changes.
The key turns in a different lock.
But you... you just burn.