Runes Beneath the Floorboards

Intro

Grandmother kept the receipts in a tin box, buried them deep

Said the paper don't burn but the memory does

I dug them up at twenty-three, still legible, still stamped

Every purchase a prayer, every date a stone

Verse

Started with nothing, a name and a debt to the landlord's nephew

Worked the cannery line, six a.m. to the dark

Fingers split like old leather, nails black with the brine

But the check came in, stub showed the hours, showed the proof

Twenty-two dollars and forty cents, first week I could taste it

Bought flour, bought kerosene, bought time

Grandmother wrote it down in her ledger, blue ink, steady hand

Said the rich keep their books to forget, we keep ours to remember

Every transaction a rung on a ladder they said we couldn't climb

She'd pull that tin out on winter nights, show me the climb

1987, we owned the house, the deed bore her signature

Took her thirty years of receipts, but the ink never faded

Never once missed a payment, never once took a shortcut

The bank manager knew her name by the third year

Respect don't come from noise, it comes from showing up

Chorus

Runes beneath the floorboards spell out everything we earned

Every nail, every nail in the frame that we turned

From borrowed ground to solid stone

What we built, we built alone

Verse

She taught me the language they don't teach in the schools

How to read a lease like it's written in blood

How to count not just money but the cost of your freedom

How the interest compounds but so does your will

I watched her sign documents with the same hand that scrubbed floors

Watched her sit across from men who expected her to bow

But she'd already calculated the sum, already knew the terms

Already knew she'd outlast the doubt in their eyes

Sister followed suit, got her own place by thirty-one

Brother opened a shop, kept the ledger on the counter

All of us reading those receipts like scripture

All of us understanding the difference between surviving and building

Chorus

Runes beneath the floorboards spell out everything we earned

Every nail, every nail in the frame that we turned

From borrowed ground to solid stone

What we built, we built alone

Bridge

The tin box sits on my shelf now

I add to it still, different decades, same discipline

My daughter asks why we keep the old ones

I tell her the same thing Grandmother told me

The paper is proof when the world tries to rewrite the story

The receipts are witnesses when memory runs thin

This is how we answer back

Outro

Grandmother kept the receipts in a tin box, buried them deep

Now they're mounted in a frame where the light hits them straight

Every date, every amount, a small defiance

The runes beneath the floorboards spelling out: we were here, we stayed, we won