Odes to Avondale Estates · Track 15 · middle

My Parents' Tudor on Berkeley Road

The residential streets — Berkeley, Clarendon, Lakeshore, Kingston — lined with the small Tudor cottages and the larger Tudor mansions, the slate roofs, the half-timbered gables, the way the houses face each other across narrow streets like an English village. Sisukiro on a porch with tea.

Lyrics

[Intro]
Late afternoon.
The sun comes through the dogwood leaves in pieces.
Four seventeen PM on Berkeley Road.

[Verse 1]
The houses here face each other like old friends.
Twenty feet of asphalt between them.
Your slate roof is warm.
Your half-timbered gables, a familiar face I know from photographs of my mother as a girl.
Leaded glass in the casement windows, blurring the world just enough.
My father painted this wicker chair a shade of green he called "Avondale Spring."
It's peeling now.

[Chorus]
And this porch...
The deed from 1924 said it had to be eight feet deep.
A threshold for living.
Room for the swing, room for the quiet, room for the whole family to wait out a summer storm.
Eight feet deep.
Deeper than the foundations, this memory.

[Verse 2]
From here I can see the corner of Clarendon.
Hear the mail truck stopping two doors down on Kingston.
George Willis's postcard town, still breathing.
He never saw the scuff marks on these floorboards.
Never heard my grandmother humming from the kitchen window.
He just drew the lines, poured the concrete, and trusted someone would call it home.

[Bridge]
The Earl Grey in my cup is getting cold.
The steam is gone.
This house holds the warmth instead.
It holds the arguments and the birthday parties.
It holds the smell of magnolia from the yard next door.
It holds the sound of my own key in the lock, long after I moved away.

[Outro]
The light is going now.
Turning gold, then amber.
Just the creak of the chain.
Just the house, breathing around me.
Eight feet deep.