A Beautiful Gift.....

Last year when I was in San Francisco, I visited with my old friend Jim DeWitt, a well-known artist who was at one time an internationally competitive sailboat racer and sailmaker.  Nowadays, he mostly paints.  During our visit, he told me he didn't have a photo of Sandpiper, the sailboat he owned when we were together.  He took this little (33') boat across the Pacific to Honolulu in the TransPac yacht race, tore up the competition on SF Bay in her, then somebody torched her with a Molotov cocktail, destroying everything except most of her aluminum hull and the toilet.  At the time, Jim had a small wooden houseboat/studio moored at Brickyard Cove where the Richmond Yacht Club is.  Sandpiper was moored alongside.  The theory was that somebody broke into and ransacked the houseboat, then torched everything to cover up the crime.  I'll never forget that middle of the night phone call, or the sight of Sandpiper, still smoking, lit by a police spotlight when I arrived shortly after Jim.

This is the photo I sent Jim last fall.

This is what I found in my email inbox last night.  He'd taken the photo and used it in his own, wonderful, inimitable style to paint a memory -- and he shared it with me.  I added the copyright text in order to use it here and not have it copied, or at least not have a usable copy.  I'm going to get a good professional print of this and hang it on my wall.  This is certainly one of the most wonderful gifts I have ever received -- maybe the most wonderful.  Thanks, my friend.

On a more mundane subject, yesterday my mailbox held a pound of buckwheat seed that I'd ordered to sow where the black plastic is.  I went out early this morning while it was relatively cool to make this happen in one of the existing raised beds. It'll crowd out any weed and provides a bunch of good green manure.  I'll need to turn it under 5-6 weeks after germination, and it won't take long for this bed to once more be ready for planting food crops.  I'm thinking fall/winter items.  All I had to remove here was basil and nasturtium.  I hope I have enough buckwheat for the new area -- certainly will for the two new raised bed portions, but I had in mind to sow it all in order to discourage more weeds/grass from coming up in the walkway areas.  See the little puddles on the black plastic?  We had a little rain overnight, apparently.  Probably just enough to make the grass start growing again!