10.

Couldn't bear to part with
my old bowling ball

Thyme

thymus vulgaris

(vulgaris meaning common and unrefined...the bad connotation is only related to describing people)

• There are over a hundred varieties of thyme, most of them difficult to tell apart.
• Thyme oil was burned in the temples of Greece.
• It symbolized bravery
• Medieval maidens embroidered bees on their hankies and wrapped them around a sprig of thyme to give to their favorite knight to wear during tournaments.
• Now we do mundane things with it like sprinkling it on our food.

This is a picture of creeping red thyme, which can also be lavender color. Creeping thyme is one of the more popular landscaping plants. It is low growing, far spreading, stepable, and so satisfying when it blooms.

This is all I have this year, but next year I hope to have yards of it. It belongs to the mint family and should be deer proof, so I'll try it outside the fence.

It was thyme that the lovely Persephone was picking when she was so cruelly abducted.

Wandering the mountainside fields of Nysa that sloped down to the sky blue Aegean Sea, she was half mesmerized by the soft buzzing of the bees and the intensely scented thyme.
I picture her as a young Lindsay Lohan...I saw a picture of her once, young, innocent and photoshopped....She looked like a dream...ethereal.

Hades...King of the Underworld saw her and instantly became besotted....and like a sweet talking Ted Bundy, he coaxed her within grabbing distance, and fled down to the dark innards of the earth.

Persephone's mother was furious! A woman of great political power she immediately shut down summer. People could starve as far as she was concerned. Let them eat cake!

Have you ever lost someone who made it feel like the sunshine had gone? Well that's how Demeter, P's mom, felt. Her sunshine was gone, and so she would make everyone's sunshine gone.

Zeus became alarmed. King of the gods, he could not allow people to die of starvation, and so he made a deal with his Ted Bundy brother, Hades.

To make a long story short, Persephone was allowed to return to the upper earth for three or four months a year, (except in California where she can stay all the time) and Demeter allowed the sun to shine for that short time. Gloom, darkness, fallow fields and below zero temps returned when P had to go back to Hades.

One more little "means nothing" fact. When P was gathering her thyme, she was not alone. Her girlfriend...forgot her name... was with her...but she was a nymph and of no help at all.

Did you know nymphs lived an average of nine thousand, six hundred and twenty years? That's a recorded fact...no kidding.

Faithful Bek hanging around while Sally is off doing whatever.