Last night, as I was chopping up this gorgeous concoction of cilantro and chive flowers, a thunderstorm blew in, tore a giant widowmaker branch off one of our maples, and dropped it directly onto the new Shed Patch garden--exactly where I'd just harvested the cilantro.

Today Paul and I will try to get it out of there with pruners and a handsaw, but we may need to wait for Tom's chainsaw. My poor ferns and impatiens! And who knows if there will be any cilantro left to salvage.

At least we got rain--only an hour of it, but a soaker, and all of the garden that isn't squashed under a tree branch is feeling pretty happy.

Before the storm I'd replaced a peaked-looking hot pepper plant and dug in a few zinnia and sunflower plants, as my seeds were not germinating well. Everything was getting stressed by the dryness and the heat, so I'm glad the weather is forecast to cool down a bit, and maybe even give us some more rain over the weekend.

Tom has three days off, thank goodness, and he and Paul are planning a canoe outing for one of those days, while my neighbor and I are going off a little outing of our own--to a lilac festival in western Maine. At some point next week or weekend, James will arrive from Chicago for a visit, and then the following weekend we'll head out to Vermont for my nephew's high school graduation. . . . This social whirl feels so strange and wonderful.