Our friend Cheryl's views of Bourges

In September of 2003, our friend Cheryl from California came to visit us in Saint-Aignan for the first time. Her husband John had died in 1998. Cheryl and I were graduate students together in the French Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana back in 1973-74, so we had aleady known each other for quite a long time. She had spent a few months on a study abroad program in Avignon back in 1971 and then a year in Paris working as a teacher in 1974-75. I spent the 1974-75 school year in Paris too. Cheryl, John, Walt, and I spent a lot of time together in California in the 1980s and '90s. I was with her at her house when the 1989 earthquake struck. We were like family. Cheryl got me my first job in the software industry in Silicon Valley in 1989. Later, after John passed, she spent a week with us in Vouvray, the famous Loire Valley wine village, in the year 2000.

;

Cheryl is my guest blogger today. When she was here in 2003, she said one thing she wanted to do was go to the city of Bourges. She said she wanted to go by train and go by herself to spend a day there walking around the city and taking pictures. In hindsight, I think she wanted to go out in France alone to have a chance to feel independent again and to speak French with French people rather that spending another full day speaking English with us. I drove her to the Saint-Aignan train station on a September morning and went back and picked her up there in the evening.

The first two pictures above are ones she took of the cathedral in Bourges, and the larger one just above is apicture of the archbishop's gardens there. I can't even remember if Walt and I had already gone to Blois in the summer of 2003. Probably not — we had been too busy getting moved into the house we had bought in the spring. Our container of furniture and other belongings hadn't arrived until the middle of July. Other friends from California had visited us in August, and I don't remember going to Bourges with them. They had brought with them their one-year-old baby.

I'm really enjoying looking at Cheryl's photos. I'm glad she gave me copies. She passed away, far too early and far too young, in 2016. She visited us in Saint-Aignan again in 2006, in 2008, and in 2011. By then, her health was failing and she wasn't traveling any more. She loved France. I wish she could have actually lived in France for a few years, but her work as a software engineer at IBM and other companies kept her in California. She wasn't ready to retire until, as it happened, a couple of years before she passed away.