13 June 2025

The moon this morning

The view from our guest bedroom window at 5:30 this morning. Photo taken with my Samsung smartphone's camera.


I've never been able to find out why there is a big B on this house's chimney. I don't know when the house was built, or by whom. The people who live there now moved in just 2 or 3 years ago.

12 June 2025

A river walk

After mentioning walks along the Cher river near our house in yesterday's post, I decided on the spur of the moment to go down there for the morning walk with Tasha. I forgot how low in the sky and bright the sun shines early in the morning, making it difficult to take photos. Here are a couple, however. By the way, Tasha is at the vet's this morning having her teeth cleaned. Walt just got back from dropping her off. He or I will go pick her up this afternoon. She had to fast starting at 8:00 p.m. yesterday. She was very disoriented and subdued this morning when she didn't get her normal breakfast at the normal time.
These two pictures are of the lock keeper's house on the right bank of the Cher from different perspectives.

11 June 2025

Local scenes and colors

Down the hill and through the woods into the river valley from our hamlet... We can take nice walks along the Cher river and around the port at the western end of the Canal de Berry, the region's two main water features.





These are photos I took within two or three miles of our house. I took them on June 11, 2005 — 20 years ago today. We're having the same kind of weather today. The area around Saint-Aignan is basically agricultural (grape-growing is agriculture too).

We live on high ground about half a mile from the river and two miles from the canal. There are often big fields of red poppies all around us at this time of year.

10 June 2025

Our first heat wave

I mean our first heat wave of the year. Already. The temperature is supposed to hit 85F this afternoon, and 90F tomorrow afternoon. We'll be spending time on our terrace (photos below) which is just off the living room and the kitchen.

We spent Sunday afternoon out there, in fact. The temperature wasn't torrid, but it was pleasant. And the company was great. We had a glass or two of wine and some home-made hummus and eggplant caviar with British friends that we hadn't seen since the beginning of the Covid pandemic five or six years ago. They brought along another American friend of theirs who has lived in Texas, New York, and California. Now she has lived in France for three or four years, if I understood correctly. It's not often that we have friends in these days, and it was a lot of fun.

The plant with yellow flowers in the photo above is a memory of my mother, who passed away in 2018. In 1997, she and I went on a road trip from North Carolina to Illinois and back. That's where I spent five or six years in graduate school back in the 1980s, and my mother had never seen the place. We stayed with old friends of mine who live outside Urbana. Somewhere along the way, my mother acquired a cutting of the sedum plant above. Back in N.C., she planted it in her back yard. When she sold her house in 2005, I went over there to help her move out. I returned to Saint-Aignan with a cutting from the sedum and I've had it growing here ever since.

09 June 2025

More Lavardin wall art


For centuries these paintings were themselves painted over and hidden from view. They were only rediscovered and uncovered about a hundred years ago, when a layer of plain gray paint was stripped off. Some have been restored.

Lavardin is also the site of a ruined medieval château-fort.

08 June 2025

More church art for a Sunday

Just some photos today. Friends who live about an hour's drive from here are coming to visit this afternoon. They're British and they're bringing along an American friend of theirs. I'll be curious to know if the American woman lives in France or is just visiting. And it will be good to see our British friends, whom we haven't seen in a year or more, and maybe since the beginning of the Covid pandemic five years ago.

07 June 2025

The church at Lavardin

Lavardin is a village about 90 minutes north of Saint-Aignan, on the river called le Loir near the town of Montoire. Charles-Henry and I drove up there in June 2015 to visit a cousin of his who had bought a small château in that area. As usual, we stopped in churches, including the one in Lavardin (pop. 178), which is known for its elaborate wall paintings. The church was built toward the end of the 11th century. The site of the town has been occupied by humans since prehistoric times.

Sources say the wall paintings at Lavardin were done between the 12th and 14th centuries. I used to tease Charles-Henry about his love of churches because he was almost radically disdainful of organized religion. I miss the many car trips we took together between 2004 and 2015. This one might have been our last one together — it's hard to remember. He died in 2024 the age of 99.

06 June 2025

Around the vineyard

Above left is the tractor path that runs along our back hedges and gate. On the left also is the plum tree (dark red leaves) that I planted there years ago. On the right is a photo of grape flowers growing out in the vineyard.




Our house is barely visible behind the trees in our back yard. You can see the garden shed, which is slightly taller than the hedge. I heard rain overnight, and it's raining right now. Predictions are for better weather (sunny, warm) starting Sunday, after rain showers today and tomorrow. We're getting a break from doing yard work.

The vineyard is surrounded by woods. Trees fall, and spiders thrive.

05 June 2025

Yesterday for lunch I made a savory cake containing cubes of cooked chicken, smoked pork larbons, sun-dried tomatoes, cheese, and herbs and spices. It's a cake or bread that is salty, not sweet.

Here's a link to the recipe. It's one I came up with myself a few years ago.

04 June 2025

Sunrise seen from the Renaudière vineyard...

...at 7:00 a.m. yesterday (June 3, 2025).

I was walking out to see the new vines that have been planted on a three-acre parcel of land about 500 meters from our house. Above right is a close-up shot of one of the new vines planted a few days ago.

03 June 2025

Springtime growth and flowers

What, more plants and flowers?!? Well, yes. I'm still trying to get used to my mobile phone and its camera. I took these early this morning when I went out for a walk with Tasha.

It's supposed to rain tomorrow, and we need rain (can you believe that?). Let it pour...

Some of the plants you see here are St. John's wort (mille-pertuis in French), honeysuckle (chèvrefeuille in French), oak, grape (the tiny white flowers), and roses.

02 June 2025

Getting from San Francisco to Saint-Aignan

Continuing my saga... On this date 22 years ago we arrived in France on our way to Saint-Aignan with a few suitcases and our 11-year-old dog Collette. We had bought a house in April 2003, when we sold our SF place and had the money to send to the notaire in the Saint-Aignan area. He stood in for us at the closing. We had seen the house for the first time in December 2022 and had handed over a down-payment. We had moved out of our San Francisco house in March after having a big garage sale to get rid of everything we could bear to get rid of. We had found a moving company that would come and do an inventory of the remaining items (required by French customs), load everything into a container, and ship the container to France. We had applied for visas at the French consulate in San Francisco.

The house we bought near Saint-Aignan as it looked back in 2003.

As soon as we had handed everything over to the movers, we packed up Walt's Jeep and we drove three thousand miles across the country to stay with my mother, who still lived in the house I grew up in, in North Carolina. We had to wait for our visas to come through before we could leave for France. She said we could stay as long as we wanted or needed to. A few days after we arrived there, we got a message from the consulate in San Francisco saying the visas were ready and we could come an get them. I asked them if they could send them to us and they said no, we had to come pick them up in person.

I explained that we had already left SF and we were three thousand miles away, in North Carolina. I asked them if they could send the visas to the French consulate for our region, which was in Atlanta. They said they could do so if we sent them a pre-paid envelope to send them in. We got all that done, and a few days later we put the dog in the car and headed out. It's a 10-hour drive from the North Carolina coast, where we were, to Atlanta, and we had to appear in person to get the visas. We were at the consulate for 10 minutes at most. We made a three day trip out of it, visiting Charleston in South Carolina and Savannah in Georgia, two cities neither of us had ever before seen.

When we got back to my mother's house, we immediately made reservations to fly from Washington DC to Paris. We wanted to arrive in France on June 1, but that wasn't possible. We ended up flying out on June first and arriving in France on June 2. We had made arrangements and obtained all the papers we needed to get authorization for the dog to be allowed to board the plane and get through customs in Paris. Upon arrival, we picked up a rental car and drove up to Rouen in Normandy to stay with friends there for a few days while we recovered from jet lag.

Arriving in Saint-Aignan... our house is less than two miles from the château.

I think it was on June 7 that we finally arrived in Saint-Aignan and started getting our house set up so we could stay here. The seller had left the place in a mess, and we didn't yet have any appliances like a telephone, a refrigerator, a stove, and a television set, and a washing machine (there was no laundromat in Saint-Aignan). We also had to buy a lawn mower because the house had been empty since April and the grass in the back yard was hip-high. We didn't have any furniture, so we bought a couple of air matresses we could sleep on and some patio furniture that we could use indoors temporarily as a dining room table and chairs. We didn't know when our container-load of furniture and other belongings would arrive. The first night we spent in the house was the night of June 12, if memory serves. We were here!

01 June 2025

Where we ended up

Today is our anniversary. On June 1, 1983, Walt and I moved in together. We rented a floor-through apartment — I guess that's called a flat — on Capitol hill in Washington DC. We lived there, just a short walk from the U.S. Capitol building, the Library of Congress, and the Supreme Court. We both had found jobs that were within walking distance of our apartment. We stayed there until October 1986, when we decided to re-locate to California. I had a federal government security clearance, and I dreaded the prospect of having FBI agents investigate and pass judgment on our so-called "lifestyle." Walt wanted to finish his studies and get an advanced degree from a California university (he ended up getting a bachelor's degree and two masters degrees at UC Berkeley).

Tomorrow is another anniversary. We arrived in France on June 2, 2003. We had sold our house in San Francisco and bought a house in the Loire Valley in central France. After living in California for more than 15 years, we had had it with stressful jobs, traffic jams, long commutes, earthquakes, and chilly summertime fog. We were suffering from burn-out. I quit my job in Silicon Valley. France beckoned; Walt and I had met and become friends in Paris in 1981. We had spent many vacations in Paris and other parts of France in the 1990s. We spoke the language and loved the food. A house in France cost only a fraction of what we sold the San Francisco house for.

After living the big city life in DC and SF, we settled down in a little village near Saint-Aignan.
We have lived here for 22 years now.

We celebrate other anniversaries too. On May 10, 2012, we were finally able to get married. We flew to Albany, New York, where Walt had grown up, and took advantage of New York's new law legalizing same-sex marriage. France would legalize what was called Mariage pour tous with a similar law a year later. We had no plan or urge to move back to the U.S. We were established in France, and we still are. It's been quite a ride over the past 42 years.

31 May 2025

Invaders

Ivy (lierre in French) growing on a wall and on a well... the well is our community well. Residents of the hamlet are welcome to take water from it, but nobody does any more. It dates back to the days when there was no piped-in water here. Apparently, the well is very deep.

The plant with yellow flowers above and below is a variety of St. John's wort, called mille-pertuis in French. It is invasive and has really spread over the 22 years we've lived here. The Wikipedia article about it says it is widely considered to be a noxious weed and is called goatweed in various places. It is in the Hypericum genus and grows worldwide. The flowers are pretty. A wild variety with smaller flowers grows out in the vineyard.