Bulloch Hall Quilting and Holiday Tours

Lyrics

[Intro]
The air in here is thick with beeswax and time.
A floorboard settles upstairs.
Another Saturday, 2 p.m.

[Verse 1]
They call themselves the Ladies Auxiliary.
A name from another time, for a task that is timeless.
Their needles move through calico, making nine-patch stories for the four-poster beds.
There's a log cabin pattern from 1982, or so the card says.
And one with a border of tiny tobacco leaves, stitched by a cousin who never left this property after 1865.
Her name is on the back.
The auxiliary's names are mostly lost to the newsletter archives.

[Chorus]
This is how a town keeps its ghosts warm.
You take the scraps, the faded threads, the things that are left.
You stitch them into a story you can tell on a Saturday afternoon.
You charge a small fee at the door.
You call it preservation.

[Verse 2]
By December, the quilts are put away.
The scent changes to pine boughs and cinnamon.
A woman in a hoop skirt, a volunteer named Carol, lights the hurricane lamps at 7 p.m.
She moves through the parlor, her speech polished from years of practice.
"This is the very mantelpiece... this is the room where Mittie Bulloch married Theodore Roosevelt Sr. in 1853."
The flame flickers on the Greek Revival columns.

[Chorus]
This is how a town keeps its ghosts warm.
You take the scraps, the faded threads, the names that are left.
You stitch them into a story you can tell on a cold December night.
You serve gingerbread in the dining room.
You call it tradition.

[Bridge]
Major James Stephens Bulloch wouldn't recognize the smell.
Or the polite applause.
The real history was louder, messier.
It didn't pause for questions from the back row.
But the house remembers.
It holds the echo of the real wedding, the real winter.
And it holds this performance, too.
One inside the other, like a cedar chest.

[Outro]
The last tour leaves.
Carol blows out the lamps, one by one.
The smell of smoke, then nothing.
Just beeswax and old wood.
The house settles back into its own quiet.
Waiting for next weekend.