The Mountain Thymes

 Six months on this date has passed since I kissed Cliff's face for the last time.  At first the time passes painfully slow yet now I look back and can't believe it's been six months.    Each summer he watched the blooms develop on his lilies waiting for them to open each morning.  The past couple of years though he didn't see the flowers because deer would eat the sweet blooms early in the morning. This year his lilies made it all the way to full open flowers.  I told him his lilies were open and beautiful.  About two hours later as I was making my bed in the little room I spotted one doe having his lilies for breakfast. Looks like another blossom trying to form. We've had so much rain this past week that the rivers are thick with clay runoff.  Yesterday stormed off and on all day with periods of heavy rain and close lightning.  The weather station was taken down when I had the shed moved and hasn't been put back up.  I miss see the barometric pressure changes,

 Green and yellow beans are almost ready for picking.    Cucumbers coming in slowly.  Red salvia (self-seeding) are growing everywhere between other vegetables and I allow them to.  Hummingbirds and other pollinators love them.    My first zucchini!  Didn't even know one was growing under those large leaves.  Also found a watermelon growing.  I've never planted melons.  The compost heap is full of seeds that grow voluntarily.  I shouldn't even plant seeds from a packet, just spread the compost and let nature go from there.   Fava beans.  I love fava beans.  They bring me back to when I walked from our home down the gravel road, past the bulls, which scared the daylights out of me because my older brother, Chip, used to tell me the bulls would charge at me so I had better run quickly past them, to the Portuguese Club where I bought their delicious fava beans during festivals.  This morning I enclosed these babies in a little fence to keep the bunnies from nibbling my leaves.

 I slept better last night, all night, but am still waking tired.  I added a 3 mg melatonin to my nighttime routine about three months ago, a suggestion from a retired nurse who thought it might help me drift into sleep and calm my mind.  So for the next week at least I'm dropping the melatonin to see how I feel when I wake.   Yesterday afternoon we had strong wild winds bring in thunderstorms.  Trees twisted and lost leaves and branches.  You understand their strength when wind looks like it's pulling them out of the ground yet they spring back straight up.  I thought Cliff was overboard with all the battery backups but after yesterday, I understand his madness.  There was a continuous flickering of power for about 15 minutes.  I turned off the A/C and the TV even though they are protected by battery backup. The generator does come on until it sense about ten seconds of power loss.  A friend just a few miles away was without power for twelve hours.  At nine I went into town to