Decatur, Clarkston, Oak Grove: The Eastern Cousins

Lyrics

The 8:12 inbound.
Smells like ozone and August.
Hot metal on the tracks at Avondale Station.
You stand here, at the heart of it.

To the west, the big sister.
Decatur waits.
Her courthouse clock, solid since 1905, measures a different kind of time.
She was here first.
We built our Tudor dream in her shadow, on her edge.
She lends us her Kroger, like a cup of sugar.

But this train... this silver thread sewn in 1979... connects the cousins.
The steel spine of eastern DeKalb.
Decatur's sober brick.
Our perfect English postcard.
Clarkston's open door.
Oak Grove's quiet memory.
All of us, a family on the East Line.

To the east, the world arrives.
Clarkston.
The platform smells like cardamom and grilled tilapia from the Saturday market.
They say sixty languages are spoken in a single square mile.
Forty-four countries, writing new names in a ledger that once forgot the Bhutanese.
A welcome center where the train stops.

And this train... this silver thread sewn in 1979... connects the cousins.
The steel spine of eastern DeKalb.
Decatur's sober brick.
Our perfect English postcard.
Clarkston's open door.
Oak Grove's quiet memory.
All of us, a family on the East Line.

And north, just a whisper... Oak Grove.
The ghost of an 1890s depot where the trains don't run anymore.
The quiet cousin with the old trees and the long memory.
We are a quilt of towns, you see.
Stitched together by this track.
Each one a different pattern, a different color.

The doors slide shut.
A soft hiss.
The train pulls away, carrying a piece of each of us to the others.
We are never just one place.
We are all the stops on the line.