Jack is still a bit reluctant.  Never known a boat builder to plan a launch date before the boat was actually finished, he said.  So we recast it as a christening. Today Brett Baer turns thirty.  Tomorrow he sets off toward South America.  And this boat has become his own personal right of passage.

It’s a year ago, nearly to the day since Anna arrived here and the day Poe died.  Back then the plants were dying because we didn’t know we had an irrigation system.  The pool was green.  The house stacked to the ceiling with boxes.  Yesterday?  I put in a wild flower / lavender garden in the front island.  Spread mulch in the newly reconfigured vegetable area.  Wrangled missing chickens.  Picked a basket of raspberries.  Brett layered in gunwale gray paint in the belly of the boat.  And I made a celebratory abalone dinner with three kinds of pasta in the colors of the Peruvian flag.  It was absolutely, one hundred percent, the shittiest meal I have ever made.  Completely inedible.  A great day all in all.  And so it goes.