Paintings by CHM's grandfather

CHM's grandfather, the 19th century painter Charles-Henri Michel, was born in 1817 and died in 1905. I don't know how many paintings he did, or how many of them still exist. Below are some that hang in museums and churches in and around the town of Peronne. I know there's one of his paintings in the Tour Jeanne d'Arc in Rouen and another in the chapel at the Château de Blois

CHM-the-grandson, the one I called a friend and who spelled his middle name Henry with a Y, was born in 1924 in Paris and died at the age of 99. So the two CHMs, grandfather and grandson, never knew each other. The father of CHM-the-grandson, who was born in 1860, was a well-known doctor in Paris. He died in 1956.

CHM photos from Neufchâtel-en-Bray

These are some photos CHM (Charles-Henry) took in the town called Neufchâtel-en-Bray in July 2010. We were driving from the Somme, site of World War I battles, to Rouen, just 25 miles south of Neufchâtel. CHM had an appointment in Rouen, a place I'm always ready to go to, because I have many good memories of it dating back
to 1972. The night before, we had feasted on a big platter of Neufchâtel cheeses in a restaurant.

The church in Neufchâtel-en-Bray is dedicated to Notre-Dame (the virgin Mary) and was built in the 12th century.
It was destroyed and rebuilt at least twice over the centuries.

CHM loved taking pictures in French churches. He also loved to go on road trips.
Tu me connais, he would tell me. J'ai toujours un pied dans la voiture...

Le Tour de France est actuellement en Normandie

A current event that's been making me think a lot about my friend CHM (Charles-Henry pour les intimes) is the Tour de France bicycle race. The race is in Normandy this week, riding through cities and towns like Rouen, Caen, Bayeux, and Vire. Charles-Henry and I visited many of those towns several times over the past 25 years.

We stayed in Rouen a few times with friends of mine. I lived in Rouen for a year back in the early 1970s. We went to Caen (rhymes with temps) on a road trip from Carteret in Normandy to Rouen in 1998 and CHM took pictures. I didn't yet have a digital camera. We went to Bayeux to see the famous tapestry there. Here's a photo of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Bayeux.

Walt and I have been to Normandy numerous times as well, including a good road trip in 1992 and another in 2005. We've also been to Rouen by train together several times, years ago, when we were staying a week or two on vacation in Paris. Rouen and Bayeux both have impressive cathedrals.

Seafood in a Paris market

I haven't been back to Paris since 2019. Or to the U.S. The pictures here are some that I took in 2016, coincidentally on July 9 that year. It was one of the last times that I saw my friend Charles-Henry (CHM).

I was looking at old photos this morning and came across these. We were walking through an outdoor market near his apartment, not far from the Eiffel Tower.

I don't know about you, but I can almost smell the ocean when I look at the photos below of fish that were for sale that day in Paris, nearly a decade ago. And I grew up just a few blocks from the fish markets in my home town on the North Carolina coast. I did a lot of fishing, crabbing, and clamming back then, and enjoyed eating fresh seafood. I also like the color of the shrimp on the right, which were sold cooked.

I'm homesick for both N.C. and Paris. Maybe I'll get to go back to both one day.

Seen in Touraine

Why did the caterpillar cross the (dirt) road?                    Was the bat in our belfry? No, in our wood stove.

Works of art at the Logis Royal in Loches

Photos taken in 2009 and 2010 with two different Lumix cameras (ZS1 and TZ3).
And no, we don't have a belfry.

Fleurs d'eté en Val de Loire, années diverses

This is not the kind of weather we're having or flowers we're seeing right now. It's rainy and chilly.
What a difference a week makes....

Salmon and shrimp for lunch

Walt has been cooking a lot of our lunchtime foods on the barbecue grill while we were experiencing extremely high temperatures. We've had sausages, beans, shrimp, salmon, and vegetables including grilled courgettes (zucchini) and aubergines (eggplants).

Other vegetables, including broccoli, green beans, and potatoes, have required some slow cooking in pots and pans that have tight-fitting lids to hold in the heat. And cooking in the morning before temperatures climbed as high as 98 or 99 degrees F. We've also been enjoying ice cream for dessert. This morning it's raining and the high temperature is predicted to be in the low 70s. Brrr.

Two photos of the Château de Saint-Aignan

Above, a view of the church and the château at Saint-Aignan in the Loir-et-Cher. I took the photo in July 2004, about a year after we came to live here. Our house is less that two miles from the château.

Below, a slightly closer view of just the château. It stands on the left bank of the Cher river about 35 miles west of the city of Tours. It was built between the 10th and 16th centuries (another July 2004 photo).

 

Another chilly morning

The daisies and the artichokes obviously haven't been unhappy with our recent torrid weather. Here's what they look like out in the back yard. This morning, like yesterday morning, the outdoor air feels chilly. This is ideal weather for the season.

The chill is back

Yesterday we cooled down a little, but by afternoon humidity started building. It was muggy, but the humidity didn't last too long. This morning, the air coming into the house — windows wide open right now — feels downright chilly. Above is a photo I just took from a west-facing window.

Below is a photo I took from the same window on July 3, 2018 — seven years ago. The skies that day were more dramatic than this morning's. The weather guy on TéléMatin just said that we'll be going into a rainy spell starting on Monday, with much milder high temperatures (low 70s F).

Salvation

Salvation on two fronts: first, the weather is changing. A weak cold front is moving across Brittany, Normandy, the Channel, the Loire Valley, and the Paris region today. It's a beginning. Temperatures won't be quite as high. By 6:00 p.m., the temperature will be just 30ºC. Yesterday, it was more like 36ºC at that hour. We'll be able to breathe again. Maybe we won't have another extreme heat wave this summer.

Can you even tell that there's a fence on our north side of our yard? It's a fence that we had put in 20 years ago. Nobody seems to know who owns the land that is on the other side of it. Not even the mairie or the maire. We wouldn't want to buy it because we'd have to pay somebody to clear the land and make it usable.

The north side fence is 50 meters long; that's more than 150 feet. The woods on the other side of it are full of blackberry brambles and other noxious, invasive weeds.

You can see one of our apple trees in the photos above. The two are about the same size. They need pruning.

The other salvation arrived yesterday morning. It has to do with yard work. Walt sent the guy who runs the landscaping business an e-mail early yesterday and asked him if he could come over and do a walk-around out in the yard to see all the big and little jobs that need to be done. We expected him to say that he'd get over here one day soon. He lives just five miles up the road from us, and he said "I can come over this morning." That was unhoped for. After seeing everything we need done: pruning our two apple trees and the big linden tree out back; cutting back plants that are invading the north side of our property and threatening to pull the fence down on that side of the yard. And also digging up the bed of millepertuis (St. John's Wort) on the south He's going to send us what is called un devis (a bid or contract) for the job. He said almost all of it is work he'll do this winter after his crew has done the annual hedge-trimming job in the Fall. So now we can breathe a sigh of relief. The work will get done. He and his crew have always done a good job for us over the past dozen or more years, but sometimes they are hard to pin down. They know we always pay our bills and have no complaints about the work they do.

Maybe I'll finally get the greenhouse cleaned out. Now that we'll be having more comfortable temperatures and also a plan of action for all the other tasks that need to be taken care of. I just noticed that we are no longer in the MétéoFrance vigilance red zone. Hurray! (See Walt's blog today for more about this subject.)

In the red...

...for heat. Here is today's vigilance map posted by MétéoFrance, the French national weather service. Actually, the map looks exactly the same for tomorrow too. We are in the red danger zone and are being asked to curtail our outdoor activities and drink a lot of water over the course of the day. I've added labels for Paris and for Saint-Aignan on the map; Paris is about 150 miles north of Saint-Aignan.

Below is a map showing today's and tomorrow's high temperatures all around the country.
We're in the 38 to 40C zone (purple). Paris is not quite as hot.

Arriving from the east

From upriver, that means. The the first town upriver from Saint-Aignan is Selles-sur-Cher (famous for goat cheese).
The next town downriver is Montrichard. The river is the Cher.There's a town every 10 miles along the Cher, and there are a lot of villages all along the way.

Here's a closer view of Saint-Aignan (pop. 3,000 or so). We're having a heat wave, with a high temperature today of 38ºC. Tomorrow a degree hotter, and Wednesday another degree hotter. Thirty-eight Celsius is 100ºF.

A close call

The storm or storms that passed through the Loire Valley three nights ago caused a lot of damage in the Blois area, including the grounds of the Château de Chambord and villages in that area. The worst of the storm tracked southward from the right bank of the Loire through Chambord toward Saint-Aignan. One village just five miles east of us was especially hard hit. We have friends over there, including an American couple who moved here 15 years ago and the man who owns and operates the landscaping business we've hired for the past 12 years or so to cut down dead trees in our yard and to trim our long, tall, wide laurel hedge every year in autumn.

Our American friends told us yesterday that they lost quite a few big trees to the high winds the storm brought. They've been busy filing insurance claims. The mayor of Couffy has declared the storm a major natural disaster for the village. Our friends have talked to some of their neighbors who have lived there for decades and nobody has ever seen anything like this kind of wind damage in Couffy before. Walt and I were very lucky this past week that the storm didn't cut through the Saint-Aignan area. The fact is, trees were blown down over at the Beauval zoo (a mile or two from here), which had to close for a day to clean up the debris.

I'm not posting anything else today. I don't know if you'll be able to view the video I'm linking to here. Let me know.

Is this a bonsai?

Does this jade plant qualify as a bonsai? I planted a small branch in this pot close to 20 years ago, I think, and it grew into this.

Meanwhile, weather reports tell us to expect temperatures in the low 90s F today, the mid-90s tomorrow, the upper 90s on Monday, and 105ºF or higher on Tuesday and Wednesday. When we had similar temperatures in July 2019, I called the phenomenon a heat storm. The same temperatures are predicted for Paris as for the Loire Valley.

Summertime storms

We have had stormy weather this week. Tuesday afternoon, a big thunderstorm blew through, passing directly over us and bringing hard rain that continued off and on overnight, but the storms were much worse north of Blois and over toward Paris. Near Blois, power wires were downed, and thousands are still without power. In Paris a lot of street trees were uprooted. Tree trunks were broken in two. There were branches everywhere, news reports said. Several metro stations were flooded and there was a foot or more of water on many streets in the city.

Here in Saint-Aignan, things were a little calmer. I took the picture on the left when I went out for the morning walk in the vineyard with Tasha on Wednesday. We were walking and looking toward the west.

When I turned around and started walking back toward the house, this is what the eastern skies looked like. South of Saint-Aignan, in many areas there were hailstorms that caused major damage.

We were lucky here. The worst "damage" we had was a four- or five-hour internet outage yesterday morning.

I assume it was storm-related.

Tall plants

Over the winter, an umbrella tree (schefflera) that I was keeping in a pot grew really tall and leggy. A few weeks ago, I decided to cut the top out of it and root it in water. I still had about a meter (about three feet) of stem left in the pot, with its roots and with just one leaf at the top. Rather than put the stem and leaf in the compost, I just set it aside in a place where it would get a lot of light to see what would happen to it. Well, one day recently I notice that leaft buds were growing all along its length. The photo on the left show what it looks like now. Meanwhile, I put the top in water and in just a few days it started growing root. I planted that cutting in a pot too. It's only half as tall as the one in my photo. I can't wait to see what it will look like toward the end of the summer.

Here's another tall plant that I keep in a pot. It's called elephant bush by some. The scientific name is Portulacaria afra and it's two or three inches taller than the Schefflera. I've read that the Portulacaria can be made into a Bonsai. I plan to do just that.