The Cow & Boule Bakery was an instant in time, brief as a spring shower, welcome as a shaft of celestial sunlight at the very tail end of a cold, dark, leafless November afternoon. The couple who founded the bakery came to it from different directions: Santina from loose ends, and Craig at wit's end from an unsatisfying career. Their goal was, is, and shall be to create a place that people enter w
ith smiles of anticipation and leave somehow enriched. The initial commitment was to give it go for a year and see what happened; at the very worst it would be their "year in Provence". The physical bakery opened June 1, 2012 and closed June 1, 2013. That hectic year brought anticipated and unanticipated benefits: the opportunity to get to know neighbors, re-acquaintance with people from the distant past, elbow to elbow friendship with kindhearted members of farmers' markets, the new found pleasure of a Facebook society, the great surprise of usually working well together, and for Craig -- who had no credentials going in -- the seemingly instant granting of status as an artisan bread baking authority. A year when the body was sorely tested and came up wanting. A year when books went by the wayside. A year when friends were rarely seen unless they stopped by. It was a year of never being able to run as fast as was understood to be required. At the end of the year, Santina and Craig, feeling that it was they (even more than their customers) who had been enriched, turned the page, sold their house and set sights on the mountains of western North Carolina. Not to be overlooked in this process was a deal for the sale of the bakery that did not pan out. Lock, stock, and barrel it would have been; everything from recipes to signage to Facebook site. And it is that last one, the Facebook identity, that would have been difficult to relinquish; it remains the green oasis of possibility and continuation. It represents a link from where we've been to where we're going. We hope you will join us as we sort through the wonder, the mysteries, and the banalities of life as we experience it.
