The Woodruff Mansion & The Mesa Bungalows

Lyrics

Oh, mesa. High ground.
908 Edgewood Avenue.
You remember, don't you?

You remember when the air smelled of fresh-cut pine and curing plaster.
The year was nineteen-hundred.
Ernest Woodruff’s grand design.
One family’s shadow, stretching long and cool across the manicured green.
A son named Robert, watching the first trolleys from behind leaded glass.

Then the thirties came calling.
A different sound on the wind.
Not horse-drawn carriages on the drive, but the bite of a saw in the morning.
The surveyors’ stakes, a picket fence of tiny futures.
The neat, sharp lines dividing up the great big dream.

Oh, mesa. You hold it all.
From one sprawling lawn to thirty front doors.
From a single gilded cage to a street full of smaller hopes.
It's the same red clay beneath the marble and the brick.

They came with calloused hands and ration books.
Unpacked their lives into rooms of plaster and fresh paint.
A mortgage paid, a patch of grass to call their own.
A different kind of wealth, measured in survival.

And the boy, Robert, from the big house on the hill…
He’d go on to sell them comfort in a bottle.
A nickel's worth of sweetness for a world gone sour.
He never knew their names, but he built his fortune on their thirst.
On the modest dreams born right here, on his father's subdivided land.

Stand here now. On Edgewood.
Look at the rooflines.
The grand and the practical, side by side.
The mesa doesn't judge.
It just holds.
It holds it all.