To Build A Home

To Build a Home - Kelli O'Hara/Bridges Company

Written by：Jason Robert Brown

There's a boat

That leaves from Napoli

Every Thursday in the morning

And a nervous bride can share a bed

With her soldier from the States

For a week

The ocean carries them

Over lost and churning water

And they land in New York Harbor

Then to Pennsylvania Station

Where they board a train

That slices like a scythe

Through the fields of America

This is Albany

This is Buffalo

This is Cleveland

This is South bend

This is Chicago

This is Osceola Station

Where a truck will take them

Deeper into Iowa

To Winterset

And three hundred Acres

Waiting to be tamed

And blade of grass by blade of grass

And ear of corn by ear of corn

And bale of Hay by day by day

They build themselves a home

And day by day and year by year

From boy to man from calf to steer

What's lost from there may not grow here

But comes the sun

Look what they've done

They've built themselves a home

At Twenty one a girl begins

To grasp the world and how it spins

She grabs a box of safety pins

And builds herself a home

And home is safe and home is fair

The porch the bath the kitchen chair

The sharp and unfamiliar air

That blow by blow

She comes to know

To build herself a home

With a son

And a daughter

And a million miles between

The fires she used to set

The hearts she used to break

The lies she used to tell

And the woman she grew up

To be

Aaah

Aaah

Aaah

Aaah

Aaah

Aaah

I learn to speak I learn to sew

I learn to let the longing go

The tractor wheel the food of snow

I build myself a home

I change my words I change my name

The fields go dry the horse goes lame

The County fair the football game

For eighteen years

It stays the same

For eighteen years

I'm proud I came

And built myself a home