Living in a blur : Chartres (2)

Our neighbor C. left yesterday. She was one of the first people we met in our "hamlet" (neighborhood) when we moved here 18 years ago. I remember that she came to our front gate one day in June or July 2003 and rang the bell. She was carrying a basket of her home-grown tomatoes and offered them to us as a gift. We didn't have a vegetable garden that first summer were were here, so the tomatoes were welcome. And we were glad to meet a neighbor.

C. is two months older than I am. That means she turned 72 in January. Back in 2003, she and her daughter had recently moved in with C.'s mother, who lived in a house her parents had bought in about 1970. They had come from the Paris area to retire here. C.'s daughter must be in her mid-30s now, and she moved to Bordeaux three or four years ago. She has a conjoint ("partner") and with him she had a baby a couple of years ago, just before the pandemic lockdowns started being instituted. A year or more ago, C. decided to sell her parents' big old house and re-locate to the Bordeaux area. She wanted to be close enough to watch her grandchild grow up and help with her upbringing. Bordeaux is about four hours south of Saint-Aignan.

C. was a really good neighbor and became a friend. She kept to herself, but always showed us a big smile when she saw us. We had some rough times. When we took Bertie the black cat in 11 years ago, he promptly started fighting with C.'s cats. C. tried to befriend Bertie but, according to what she told us, he attacked her and badly scratched her legs. I assured her that Bert was lovable and docile when he was around us. Things started settling down after a year or two, but C. and her mother (who passed away eight or nine years ago) were convinced that Bert was vicious and untameable.

One day I was going out for a walk with our dog and Chantal saw me. She called me over and pointed to a chimney high up on her roof. There were two cats up there, and one was a black cat. She asked me if I could do anything to help, because Bert wanted to fight and had her cat pinned down. I asked her if she was sure it was Bertie. To find out, I called him by name. He seemed surprised to see me. He immediately stood up, came down the roof, and jumped into my arms. C. and her mother were stunned by that turn of events.

A few years later the "hostilities" had ended. One year, C. was going out of town for a few days. She normally called on another of our neighbors to take care of her cat or cats in her absence, but that time the other neighbor was also going to be out of town. She told C. that she might ask me and Walt to take care of her cat while she was gone. She did, and we said that would not be a problem. She gave us the keys to her house and told us what needed to be done. The cat needed to be let out in the morning, and then let back in at mid-morning and fed. It would go back outside after eating and needed to be let back in before dark. Walt did most of the job and it all went very smoothly.

A year or so later, Walt and I wanted to go spend a week in a gîte in Burgundy. We asked C. if she would take care of Bertie while we were gone. She said she would — her wariness about him had waned — and we invited her over, showed her how it would all be set up (over an apéritif), and gave her the keys to our house.

When we got home from our trip, she told us that everything had gone well. We took care of her cat a few more times over the years, and she took care of Bert when we went on week-long trips to other parts of France. She really did us a great service. In fact, Bert became a daily guest at her house, and she fed him, she told us. We were surprised because we feed him copíously and he is an active and successful hunter of small rodents. Anyway, we'll miss C. She was a quiet neighbor, welcomed us at the beginning, worked through all the cat issues, and turned out to be somebody we trusted implicity. She didn't hold a grudge. What else can you ask of a neighbor? C. was obviously distressed yesterday when we said au revoir to her. I hope that she knew that we were distressed too. We'd known that she wanted to move, and that she'd found a buyer for her house, but it wasn't real until we saw her drive away. I wonder if we will ever see her again.

P.S. The photos here are some more that I took inside the Cathédrale de Chartres back in 2006, on my last visit there. I obviously didn't know how to use the camera well enough to get clear, sharp pictures of the stained-glass windows. Nonetheless, I found them interesting and striking, so I'm posting them anyway. I was thinking about Chartres because our friends Evelyn and Esta went there when they left Saint-Aignan last week. I wish I could have gone with them.