the grey-to-black veins suddenly compete with actual fog pressing against a houseboat studio in Sausalito, where the marine layer slides across Richardson Bay and turns every interior into a study of muted light nothing like the mineral springs glow of Saratoga. Here the darker figuring that defines Black Limba as distinct from its paler cousin becomes not ornament but architecture, those nearly black streaks reading like the rigging lines visible through every window, and the golden brown heartwood holds its authority precisely because it refuses to go grey the way untreated surfaces do in salt air. Rosebud ships these sheets from Louisville knowing that a Sausalito millworker will judge veneer the way a painter judges canvas—by how it behaves when the light source is never fixed, when morning burns gold and afternoon disappears into white—and that the sapwood's pale greyish-to-yellowish transition, not clearly demarcated from the heartwood, mirrors the very geography of a town built where hill meets water meets sky. What matters as these same flitches continue south toward Savannah, where humidity thickens and light arrives with an entirely different weight, is whether the color's inevitable darkening with age
