Capitola Flour Mill: Finest Family Flour Since 1898

Lyrics

There's a ghost of a taste in the air here.
Not cotton. Not ink.
Something finer.
White dust in the sunbeams.
Before the bales were stacked to the rafters, before Sidney Johnston kept his books…
there was the grain.
It came on the siding, the tracks that cut right under your floorboards.
A river of iron, bringing a river of wheat.
The Atlanta Milling Company woke you up.
Made your timbers hum a new song.
Eighteen ninety-eight.
A promise in a paper sack.
Capitola.
They stamped it right on the bag.
Capitola.
Finest Family Flour.
From your belly, out to the kitchens of a city learning its own name.
Bread rising in a thousand ovens.
I think about the millers.
Their hands, their faces, permanently pale with the stuff of it.
Breathing it in. Living in the cloud.
And the manager, upstairs, listening to the grind.
The steady rhythm of profit, of progress.
A ledger filled with numbers that smelled like bread.
Capitola.
A name whispered over a countertop.
Capitola.
Finest Family Flour.
From the rumble under your feet, to the quiet grace of a family table.
Years fell away. The dust settled. The name was forgotten.
Until a conversation… over coffee, I imagine.
The new owner, and a man with a memory.
He said, "Yes. I was the manager here."
He said, "This was the place."
One handshake, and a hundred years collapse.
The story found its tongue again.
Now the laptops glow where the grinding stones turned.
But sometimes, when the light is just right…
you can still see it.
The finest dust.
The ghost of the grain.
Capitola.
Still rising.