the cherry orchards give way to water and the light shifts entirely. In Traverse City, where Grand Traverse Bay scatters northern light across every surface it touches, Black Limba's golden-brown heartwood answers that luminance with a warmth that feels almost collaborative—the dark streaks and veins reading like the shoreline itself, irregular and unhurried, drawing the eye deeper into the figure rather than across it. Where Toledo demanded presence from its materials, Traverse City asks for conversation, and Limba's sapwood, that pale greyish-yellow brown bleeding seamlessly into heartwood without hard demarcation, gives interiors the kind of tonal continuity that northern Michigan's design community has learned to trust. As the color deepens with age, it will track the seasons here the way good woodwork should—darkening through autumn, holding memory in its grain—carrying its story south and west toward Tucson, where
