///*****/// [Intro] A screen door on a spring And a bag already packed [Verse 1] She was married at nineteen To a good and boring man With a good and boring kitchen And a good and boring plan And she did the whole thing rightly For eleven careful years And she ironed and she gardened And she swallowed all her tears And then one ordinary April With the lilacs coming through She just stood there in the doorway And she knew the thing she knew [Pre-Chorus] There was no great catastrophe There was no other man There was just a woman waking up Inside her own two hands [Chorus] So she took the wildflower highway With the windows rolling down Left a note upon the table And the dust above the town And she is not running from a monster And she is not running to a saint She is running to the woman That she was before she wasn't On the wildflower highway [Verse 2] Now he tells it at the diner Like a tragedy, a theft Like the ground came up and took her Like she had no cause to leave And I have known them both for twenty years And I love them both the same But she was going quiet in that house Like a candle in a jar And you cannot call it cruelty When a person wants to breathe [Pre-Chorus] So I do not judge the leaving And I do not judge the stayed I have seen the both of them up close And I know what they paid [Chorus] So she took the wildflower highway With the windows rolling down Left a note upon the table And the dust above the town And she is not running from a monster And she is not running to a saint She is running to the woman That she was before she wasn't On the wildflower highway [Verse 3] She sends me postcards from the desert And a photograph from Maine There is a colour in her face now That was not there when she came She is teaching art in Boulder And she has a dog named Rae And she plays the piano badly And she plays it every day And she wrote to say she's sorry For the wreckage that she made And I wrote back and said the truth Which is that we are all afraid [Pre-Chorus] And the bravest thing a person does Is walk into the light With no map and no forgiveness And a bag packed overnight [Bridge] There are highways full of wildflowers That grow up through the crack Nobody plants them, nobody waters And nobody holds them back And they come up every springtime And they never once look back [Guitar Solo] [Final Chorus] So take the wildflower highway With the windows rolling down Leave a note upon the table And the dust above the town You are not running from a monster You are not running to a saint You are running to the person That you were before you weren't On the wildflower highway [Coda] So here is to the leavers And here is to the stayed Here is to the difficult And beautiful and afraid May you find it in the desert May you find it in the rain May you find it in a kitchen That you never left again [Outro] A screen door on a spring And a bag already packed And a woman going somewhere And she is not coming back
