Odes to Avondale Estates · Track 5 · middle

Lake Avondale: The Civic Heart

Lake Avondale — the 12-acre artificial lake at the geographic center of the town, the swan boats, the lakeside concert lawn, the way the lake was designed as the focal point so every Avondale street eventually leads to it. The town's shared backyard. Sisukiro at the lake edge at dusk.

Lyrics

Late May. The air goes cool.
I'm here again. At your edge.
They say you were a stream, a spring, before the plan.
Before George Willis drew the lines in 1924.
Just a low place in the Ingleside woods.
I think about the shovels.
The payroll ledger with no names, just a line item for labor.
Digging out this basin, this heart, from red Georgia clay.
Twelve acres of intention.
And every street they laid, every curb they poured...
Clarendon, Berkeley, Kingston...
They all end here.
They all lead back to your quiet water.
A compass point for a town built from a story.
You are the last page of every chapter.
The swan boats are sleeping at the dock.
Tied up neat by the white boathouse with the green trim.
I can smell the cedar planks, still warm from the sun.
Somewhere in your dark, the ghosts of those bass fingerlings from 1927.
The great-grandson of that nine-pounder from 1974.
The one they mounted in the town hall.
You hold all the small trophies.
And every street they laid, every Tudor gable they raised...
Clarendon, Berkeley, Kingston...
They all face here.
They all lead back to your quiet water.
A compass point for a town built from a story.
You are the last page of every chapter.
From the concert lawn, I hear a sound check.
A single note, drifting over.
The first porch lights flicker on across the way.
Doubled in your surface.
A postcard from England, sent a hundred years ago.
And you are the ink. You are the stamp. You are the reason it arrived.
Twelve acres of stillness.
The town breathes out.
And you breathe in.
Goodnight, Lake Avondale.
Goodnight.