The inimitable Colleen Smith is closing Full Circle Cafe but will be extending hours and adding to the menu at Adelaide's Books and Coffee in Ocean Park.

When we convened at Nanci and Jimella’s Café and Cocktails (jimellaandnancis.com ), a couple of diners still raving about the event made a point of thanking us again for our work. My fellow lit-colleagues exclaimed, “The Ocean Park poetry scene rocks!” Who knew?

After our reading when the chairs were folded and tucked away, Colleen took me aside to share some momentous news — she has decided to close Full Circle. “I just want to thank my community for supporting me for these 38 years,” she said. But the whole story is a bit more complicated than that.

“In 1979 Jerry and I came here from Vancouver, WA and started looking for a place we could serve food.” They even considered, then rejected as too large, the Ark before Nanci Main and Jimella Lucas purchased it. After buying and running a laundry while they continued looking, they finally settled on the block building on Bay Avenue just a stone’s throw from the ocean. They called it “Kopa Wecoma,” Chinookan wawa for “by the sea.” They made a lot of diners happy over the years, until their divorce and the closing of the restaurant in 1992.

But you can’t keep a good chef down and soon enough, “Colleen’s Creations” had opened. “I had a yarn store with new husband Gary. I was doing commission knitting and selling commission sweaters,” she said. “Then I started selling espresso and pastries and I took the building over and we gradually evolved into serving lunch — it was such a gradual thing. When Kopa Wecoma closed I had said ‘I will never, ever, EVER sell food again!’ and then I realized I had come full circle, so that was our name: the Full Circle Café.”

“You forget how hard it is,” she continued, “working in the restaurant business. You just remember the good things — the generations of kids I’ve seen come and go and grow up and bring me their kids. I had no children of my own so when those customers’ kids had their own children, I got to be their surrogate grandma. I’m going to miss that so much because they are so much a part of me, a part of my identity as ‘Colleen.’ I know that separation is going to be a hard one for me.”

Why is she closing? The higher minimum wage has made it even more difficult for small businesses to find and keep good staff. And there is a housing crisis in our county: there is a lack of good, affordable housing stock for folks 25-40, especially for those trying to raise a family.

“It’s hard to live here on one wage,” she said, “and there are fewer good jobs now — with Bendicksen’s closing — and Jolly Rogers, Jessie’s and the fishing industry slow down. To sustain a family household you need a second income. The restaurant business is a hard business and the world is changing. It’s changing from what we knew growing up and what our parents knew. There are so may outside influences now; young people don’t understand our work ethic, they buy differently, they eat differently, they vacation differently. I just started thinking, if I don’t change with the times, I’ll eventually implode.”

Never fear though! — Colleen is keeping the Full Circle bakery, prep area and part of her work crew so that she can expand the hours and offerings at Adelaide’s Books and Coffee (www.yelp.com/biz/adelaides-coffee-and-books-ocean-park). Not immediately, but over time.

“I don’t like to think I’m losing the continuity that is so dear to so many of us, the memories that evoke that sense of the past helps us in the future so we’re not ships sailing in the wind without any connections. You can feel rootless when half the family is spread across the continent, or the world. But when a family comes back to us for their reunions or birthdays, I remember every one of their names, I remember how they like their lattes!”

“I try to teach this new generation of employees that there’s a certain amount of detail work that is not about being a strict disciplinarian, it’s something more important — it’s the details that have gotten lost in our food service industry especially with fast food. You remember their drink and you call them by name. When you sit in a room together and you’re connected by that six degrees of separation — you end up meeting perchance at one time and then sometimes you start a new cycle of life. People have met here and gotten married!”

Yes, it’s a small precious world and our part of it — our neighbors across the river and our amazing Peninsula community — is remarkable, magical even.

Colleen has served our Peninsula for 38 years and she’s smart enough and brave enough to know that she needs to make a change. So she says, “I wish to say goodbye,” but in the next breath she adds, “See you at Adelaide’s!”