As you can see, it was cold on that date 15 years ago. It's much warmer today. It's raining this morning and there's no ice or snow to be seen. Actually, we are experiencing what the weather forecasters are calling une vague de douceur — "a warmth wave." You can't really call it une vague de chaleur, but it's the wintertime equivalent.
The frozen puddles on the road through the vineyard remind me of eggs cooked sunny side up (or of raw oysters). In the picture on the right just above, it looks like somebody had been through with a snow plow, leaving little piles of ice on the shoulder of the road.
A rose is a rose is a rose...
The church and château at Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher
And on Saturday mornings there are two outdoor markets in Saint-Aignan. The farmers market is on the central square in the old town, and the vendors include a big fish monger, three pork butchers (charcutiers) , a butcher and a horsemeat butcher, two poultry stands that also sell spit-roasted chicken, rabbits, and pork roasts, two cheese merchants (one sells just goat cheese made on his farm), and four or five fruit and vegetable stands. There's a woman who sells the mushrooms she grows on her farm, a man who sells snails (alive or cooked), a woman who sells produce, cheeses, and eggs from her farm, and a man who sells flowers, potted plants, and seedlings for your garden in the spring.
On the main square in the newer part of Saint-Aignan (5 minutes' walk from the farmers market), there's a Saturday market where you can buy clothes (picture), shoes, table linens, curtains, and other dry goods. On special occasions (two or three times a year), there are big town-wide flea markets with stalls set up all along the main streets and squares. On those days, you can find a great deal of everything you could ever think of to buy, from arts and crafts to cars.
In Noyers, there's a farmers market on Sunday mornings where many of the same vendors sell their products. Ten miles distant, Selles-sur-Cher has a big food and dry goods market on Thursday mornings, Contres has one on Friday mornings, and Montrichard has its own on Monday afternoons and Friday mornings. A little farther afield, Amboise (20 miles away) has a huge market on Sunday mornings -- one of the largest in the region or even in France, they say -- as well as a smaller food market on Friday mornings, and Valençay (15 miles away) has one on Tuesday mornings. I won't even mention the markets and supermarkets in Tours (pronounced TOUR) and Blois (BLWAH), where we go to shop just a few times a year. And in the town of Loches (say LUSH), just half an hour southwest of Saint-Aignan by car!
Within four miles of our house, besides all that, there are four supermarkets, two in Saint-Aignan (Ed and SuperU) and two across the river in Noyers (Intermarché and Champion). There is smaller grocery store, plus a post office, two bakeries, a café, a library, a hair salon (Mme Barbier), a library, and a garage that sells used cars, in our little village, just on the edge of Saint-Aignan. In Noyers there are restaurants, bakeries, cafés, and all the other normal businesses a town might have, including four hotels that I can think of and a great truck-stop restaurant. There are several garages and car dealerships (Citroën and Renault -- the Peugeot dealer, Garage Danger, is in Saint-Aignan). There are a couple of service stations, and three of the supermarkets have gas pumps. There are three big hardware/building supply/do-it-yourself stores, and a big five-and-ten-cent-style store in Noyers. The train station, with service to Tours, Vierzon, and Bourges, is over there. There's also a computer store and there are four furniture/appliance stores.
What don’t we have? There is no cheese shop, and there is no fish market in the area. But the supermarkets have both, and so do the farmers markets, so good cheeses and fresh fish are readily available. There’s no auto supply store, though there is a new tire store. There’s no wine shop, but the whole area is covered with wineries where you can buy wine at retail, in bottles, boxes, or in bulk, and the supermarkets have big wine and beverage sections. Two other shops in Saint-Aignan, one a wine bar and the other a gift shop, sell wines also. There’s no office supply store, so you have to rely on the supermarkets or drive up to Blois (25 miles) or over to Tours (35 miles) for those products. There's a big shopping center south of Blois, about 20 miles from Saint-Aignan.
Mostly, what Saint-Aignan doesn’t have is traffic. The one bridge across the river can get a little backed up on Saturdays or in July and August when there are a lot of tourists around. But the backup might be 20 cars. It’s nothing, of course, compared to the traffic around Paris or big American cities. In fact, it’s nothing compared to the traffic in my home town in North Carolina, which you have probably never heard of. I was there last April and I was amazed at the number of cars on the big wide highways that have been built there. Everybody is going to the Wal-Mart SuperCenter or the Home Depot!
In our area here in the Cher river valley, there is what is called a route nationale that runs along the river connecting Saint-Aignan toTours (pop. 250,000), 35 miles west, and to Bourges (pop. 150,000), 50 miles east. The route nationale is a two-lane road. There is a main north-south route that links Saint-Aignan to Blois (pop. 75,000), 25 miles north. There is an extensive network of smaller two-lane highways linking towns and villages all around the area, and an even more extensive network of narrow country lane covering the countryside. The narrow country lanes often have no pavement markings (no center line, etc.) and are mostly too narrow for two cars to be able to pass each other easily. You have to slow down and pull a little off the road to the right when you meet an oncoming car.
We have a new toll road (autoroute) that ends at Noyers for now. It's a direct link to Paris, which is about a three-hour drive north. The extension that will connect us to Tours and beyond is under construction a will open in a couple of years. The toll to Paris is about $20.00.
The countryside is a little hilly, and the Cher river runs through a fairly wide and fairly deep valley. It's a couple of hundred miles long. At places there are cliffs along the river, but mostly there are just hills. Our house is a the top of a hill right along the edge of the valley, and we are about a mile from the river itself.
Most of the housing is single-family dwellings, with old townhouses in Saint-Aignan and Noyers, but there are several apartment buildings in each town. A lot of people have big lots -- an acre or two is not uncommon. And of course many people own a lot more land than that. Most of the land around here is devoted to vineyards and vegetable gardens. There aren't many cattle to be seen, though there are some horse farms.
If you've read this far, maybe you'd like to see this post (link) from June 2006 that contains a number of photos of the town of Saint-Aignan.
Despite all the gloomy weather forecasts earlier in the week, the sun poked through yesterday afternoon and I had a good walk with Tasha and my camera. On the right are a big tree and some of the hedges in the across-the-road neighbors' yard.
This is the 3 lb. de-boned, rolled, and tied lamb shoulder that the butcher in Saint-Aignan prepared for us.
As you can see, the roast just barely fit in our air-fryer. I was glad it did, because it cooked much faster
We ate the lamb with Swiss chard and flageolet beans. Both are popular side dishes in France.
For today, a Thanksgiving season photo from 2012. More tomorrow of the 2025 lamb roast we ordered from the butcher in Saint-Aignan. I picked it up yesterday without a hitch. It's beautiful.
It's below freezing this morning according to Accuweather — our outdoor thermometer reads +2C right now but it's in a protected location. Accuweather goes on to predict rain tonight and tomorrow, so I guess our cold spell is ending.
