Just add WATER, LOVE, and SUNSHINE to your life by reading these ninety-nine poems written by the late William (Bill) August Skaife--you are GUARANTEED to GROW!

Bill Skaife was an inventor, an entrepreneur, a private pilot, and a writer of both prose and poetry. Born in the heart of the American Midwest in 1931 in Dubuque, Iowa, Bill earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1954 and a Juris Doctor degree in 1955, both from the University of Iowa. During his lifetime, Bill founded at least a dozen companies, some of which were successful. The New York Times did an above the fold front page story about him and one of his early businesses in 1961. And sometimes he wasn't successful. Sometimes he failed, spectacularly. His life was complicated, with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. And his inventions were almost always - heartbreakingly so - at a tipping point. Bill secured eight floriculture, horticulture, and food-related patents during his lifetime and was working on his ninth patent when he died in 2010 from pancreatic cancer.

Bill's poems are arranged into three chapters - "Water," "Love," and "Sunshine" - based on the Springtime Flower Greeting Bill invented in the early 1970s, marketed in his words: Just Add, Water, Love, and Sunshine. Guaranteed to Grow! By simply adding water, the Springtime Flower Greeting will literally spring into life creating before your eyes a flower box filled with peat soil and at the same time activating the seeds and fertilizer. Within a few days, with your love, you will have plants sprouting, and with sunshine, you can have the pleasure of watching them mature and flower for months.

It has been a decade since my dad, Bill Skaife, died. Ever since, I have been quietly obsessed with figuring out how to tell his story. He left behind hours of video of himself exposing assorted secrets and intimacies about his life; an unpublished 305-page autobiography; numerous unfinished business projects; dozens of boxes of his old marketing materials, treatises, and technical papers; and poems--poems that he wrote all throughout his life--delicate yet powerful perceptions about life and all that it is. With his story all told in his own words, no less--it hardly makes sense that it has taken me a decade to get this far. Well, suffice it to say, it's complicated. -- Paige Pressley (from the foreword)

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