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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The vineyard is surrounded by woods. Trees fall, and spiders thrive.
...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.
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.
The house we bought near Saint-Aignan as it looked back in 2003.
Arriving in Saint-Aignan... our house is less than two miles from the château.
After living the big city life in DC and SF, we settled down in a little village near Saint-Aignan.
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.
