Craftsman & Victorian: Gingerbread and Gables

Lyrics

Dusk settles on Sydney Street.
The air cools.
And the first porch light hums to life.
A soft, Edison glow.
Hello, you Queen Anne.
You wear your gingerbread trim like it's spun sugar.
Fish-scale shingles catching the last of the light.
A turret reaching up, a quiet little secret kept from the street.
Did the carpenter who cut that lace for your gables
know he was making a memory?
A hundred years of them.
One a fairytale, painted in pastels.
The other, a prayer in timber and stone.
Side by side on the same plot of land.
Craftsman and Victorian.
Each telling its own story of what it means
to call a place home.
And you, my sturdy friend.
You show your bones to the sky.
Those exposed rafter tails, an honest confession.
Your tapered columns, rising from a foundation of rough-hewn stone,
feel cool to the touch even in August.
Gustav Stickley would have smiled, I think.
He would have understood this built-in bench,
this quiet strength.
One a fairytale, painted in pastels.
The other, a prayer in timber and stone.
Side by side on the same plot of land.
Craftsman and Victorian.
Each telling its own story of what it means
to call a place home.
From your sleeping porch, you heard the lions roar from the zoo.
From your veranda swing, you watched the generations pass.
Both of you built by hands whose names are lost.
Hands that knew the grain of Georgia pine.
Hands that set the glass in the wavy window panes.
You both held the laughter.
You both held the quiet grief.
Now all the porch lights are on.
A string of beacons down the block.
A promise made in the quiet dark.
We are here.
We are still here.