Porch Lights from Crabapple to Avalon

Lyrics

A single bulb flickers on.
Yellow against the blue dusk.
Just one.
On a porch in Crabapple.

The old ones burn differently.
A warmer yellow.
A slower hum.
On the farmhouses set back from Birmingham Highway.
Lights that waited for wagons, for men walking home from the grist mill.
Lights that cut through pine-scented dark a hundred years before the streetlights came.
They remember the smell of cotton dust on the evening air.
They remember Milton County, before the name was a ghost on a parkway sign.

From Crabapple down to Avalon.
An unbroken line of welcome.
A thousand small suns against the night.
We left the light on for you.
The stagecoach stop, the data center, the front door on a quiet cul-de-sac.
It all says the same thing.
Come in out of the dark.
Goodnight.

Then the newer lights, a brighter white.
Down GA-9, the river of them flows.
Past the office parks on Windward, sleeping giants of glass and steel.
Through the subdivisions, each doorway a lit-up promise.
To the brownstones at Avalon, where the plaza glows like a fallen constellation.
A different house, a different year. 1924, 2024.
But the same hand reaches for the switch by the door.

From Crabapple down to Avalon.
An unbroken line of welcome.
A thousand small suns against the night.
We left the light on for you.
The stagecoach stop, the data center, the front door on a quiet cul-de-sac.
It all says the same thing.
Come in out of the dark.
Goodnight.

I stand at my own door.
Hand on the cool brass of the knob.
It's 9:47 p.m. on a clear October evening.
And I can feel them all burning.
A current running under the asphalt.
A promise made by strangers to other strangers.
That there is a place to come home to.
That the story isn't over.
That the morning will find us here.

The first star.
The last porch light.
Goodnight, Alpha.
Goodnight, Retta.
The lights burn on.
Goodnight.