Feelin' Blue

Some time ago (can it be fifteen years already?!) I opened a little place in this Burg of ours called The Blue Rose Cafe. It was in a converted CA bungalow, one of the first coffee houses here in town and designed to be comfortable for all ages. We served coffee, really good black and herbal teas with herbs picked from our garden, italian sodas, grilled focaccia sandwiches, salads with my coveted herbal salad dressing, soups, desserts and beer and wine.

It had a "living room" area off the main room, board games to play, books and magazines to read and a back yard with tables where you could eat outside in good weather. We featured local bands on Friday and Saturday nights, mostly jazz and blues, and special events from time to time like Flamenco Sunday, a Belly Dancing night and a Mardi Gras party. My "kids" both worked there, as well as many of their friends.

Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? Well, it certainly had many of those moments. We opened it with such joy and hope. But it was ahead of its time for this town and two other similar businesses opened in that same year. The town just wasn't ready to support all of them. And that winter, three months after we opened, was very stormy and there was flooding in the center of town for the first time in some 20 years which filled the cafe's back yard and under the house with water.

I was capitalizing the business and supporting my family by myself and, after a year and a half, I had to go back to my regular day job to make more money. It just got too hard to work in the city and then come back and fill in and/or do clean up at the cafe week in and week out.

Some people came along who wanted to put a full blown restaurant in the place, so I leased it out to them. They lasted a couple of years, then passed their lease on to another home grown restaurant here in town that needed a bigger space, the Ravenous Cafe. They are still there, after 10+ years, and doing just fine.

The Blue Rose sign was made by a local craftsman, Neon Bob. I did the lettering in my handwriting and Bob copied it in fluorescent light. We hung it on the front of the building and used to turn it on at night before we even opened for business. People would walk down to that end of town just to look at its glorious blue glow.

When we closed the cafe, I had Bob build a box to hold the sign in which to mount it on the back of my house. We turn it on for special gatherings and we had one such get together this last weekend when my Son and Dear Daughter in Law got back from their two months of sabbatical wanderings on the other side of the world.

It made us feel kinda blue, in a good way.

Chloe and Lulu

Dancing in the Dark

Big Blue Kisses!

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