Smoke Tree Farm

Lyrics

[Intro]
A surgeon’s hands, trained for the delicate bones of the inner ear.
Dr. David Harold Walker, Harvard class of nineteen hundred.
He left the city noise of Boston, the wards of Mass Eye and Ear, for a different kind of quiet.

[Verse 1]
Nineteen twelve.
The scent of fresh pine and cedar on the air.
A Colonial Revival house rising from the dirt.
He bought this land, this peace.
Traded the sharp scent of carbolic acid for the smell of turned earth and lime.
Mary Brooks Walker by his side.
They drew the plans, they laid the stones.
Built a life behind the old New England walls.

[Chorus]
And they planted the smoke trees.
Cotinus coggygria.
A haze of purple-pink in the summer heat.
Smoke that doesn't burn.
Smoke you can walk through.
On the long lawn of Smoke Tree Farm.
A memory before it even happened.

[Verse 2]
The seasons turned over the gardens.
Formal beds and tended paths.
Dr. Walker would come home from the city, shed its dust.
Walk among his strange and beautiful shrubs.
In autumn, their leaves turned to fire.
Scarlet and orange, a final, brilliant show.
A private world, manicured and wild at once.

[Chorus]
And they lived among the smoke trees.
Cotinus coggygria.
A haze of purple-pink in the summer heat.
Smoke that doesn't burn.
Smoke you can walk through.
On the long lawn of Smoke Tree Farm.
A memory before it even happened.

[Bridge]
A good life is a fragile thing.
A grand estate is a season.
That feathery plume, that beautiful illusion…
It looks so solid from a distance.
But up close, it’s just air.
Just a trick of the light.
Like a promise that can't be kept.

[Outro]
Dr. Walker died in fifty-nine.
Mary followed in seventy-one.
The houses came later.
But sometimes, on a still evening in June…
I can almost see it.
A purple mist hanging over the lawns that used to be.
The ghost of a garden.
The smoke that never cleared.