The City Below

This is one of many songs inspired by the mountains where I grew up. My father passed away this week at 100 years old and I’ve been thinking about all the walks we took together through the mountain meadow at about 8,000 feet, near our home where he lived until a week ago today.

This song is an imagined history of that meadow, which is still fairly wild and filled with relics of pioneer and Ute lives. He used to walk with my brothers and I there, telling us all the names of the flowers and trees and birds…sand lily, douglas fir, fireweed, mouse-eared chickweed, stonecrop, quaking aspens, blue spruce, cottonwood, larkspur, penstemon, skullcap, lady slipper, willow, mariposa lily, wild iris, mountain bluebell, columbine, chokecherry, service berry…..

It is hard to believe he is gone. But he went very quietly, while I was singing to him, after 100 truly epic years. Stay tuned to hear more about that.

The City Below

Words and Music by Camille Brightsmith

Walking in the meadow
There are falling fences
Fences for a purpose unknown
Graffiti in the springhouse      
The teens from the village do not know
Do not know

There were children a-many
Spent their hours at mending
These fences 
And skipping flat stones

There was smoke in the chimney
There were pheasants a-plenty
And they watched from their windows
As the lights grew to grow
In the city
The city below

Minnows in the water
Shining like silver
Cattails barely hold up the crow
Fiddle headed ferns
Curl out giving their shelter
To the secrets that this meadow holds

There were children a-many
Spent their hours at mending
These fences 
And skipping flat stones

There was smoke in the chimney
There were pheasants a-plenty
And they watched from their windows
As the lights grew to glow
In the city
The city below

Gazing at the world
O’re a weary shoulder
Climbing up the mountain towards home

The City grew beneath them
'Til they finally deserted
Now the meadow
Feels better, alone

As the stars started fading
Their laughter was waning
And the lights from the city
Cast a strange orange glow
No more smoke in the chimney
N’er an echo nor memory 
of the children that fled 
from the city below

Photo by my cousin Marcy while she was celebrating my father’s 98th year