Red leaves

Another Sunday already. The days, weeks, months, and years go by faster and faster. In two days, it will be 10 years since I wrote and published my first post on this blog. Dix ans ! I started the blog about 2½ years after moving to Saint-Aignan in 2003. Walt started his blog a few days before mine. He discovered blogging first.

So much has changed around here, but then again everything seems to be about the same. (Isn't that some kind of French proverb?) In our hamlet, six people have died since 2005 — four of them were well into their nineties when the time came. There are at least six of us still living full-time in the hamlet, including a new family a few houses down. There might be as many as five people living in that house, with at least one cat and one dog, but I don't know any of them yet. At this point, they keep to themselves.

I don't do much touring around any more. I enjoy driving less and less. I've seen all the big châteaux. I don't go to the outdoor markets much any more either. I enjoy my trips to the supermarkets and hardware stores, where people seem to recognize me. Nobody ever comments now about my American accent, or looks at me like an alien, or asks me why I would ever have thought to leave California to come live out here in the French countryside. I think I've become part of the landscape. Out there walking with the dog...

Renovations and repairs

The hamlet we live in, two miles outside the town of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher in the Loire Valley region, consists of nine houses. Three of them, including ours, are about 50 years old. The other six are much older (but I'm not sure how old they are). We are located on high ground above the Cher river valley, less than a mile from the river itself, surrounded by vineyards, ravines, and woods.

The old stucco (enduit, crépi) has been stripped off this stone house, exposing the stones.

I think most of the old houses were basically ruins 50 years ago. They were bought by people who set about fixing them up and making them into comfortable places to live. In other words, a new community of people was formed here in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, two of the houses were occupied only seasonally when we moved here 12 years ago, and now two others are just used from time to time, by people who live in the Paris area most of the year.

Old roof tiles are not replaced, but cleaned and put back into place on new wood slats.

As we all know, houses are always works in progress, just as towns, villages, hamlets, and châteaux are. Even the old houses around here have had wings and rooms added on over the years. I doubt that many of them of them look the way they used to.

The exposed stone will be hidden by stucco again, like this end wall, when the work is finished.

One of them would be hard to identify as an old farm house, so much has it been fixed up. One carries the name La Ruine, but it is far from being dilapidated nowadays. It's about the biggest and nicest house in the hamlet. It and another one might be counted among the nicest houses in the Saint-Aignan area.

Nearly all of the old houses have had their former greniers (haylofts)/attics converted into modern living space. Only our house had changed hands over the past dozen years — we bought it in 2002 — until recently, when newcomers to the hamlet bought a house three doors down from ours.

Here are some photos of ongoing renovations around the hamlet. Mostly they consist of minor repairs and improvements. By the way, the difference between a hamlet and a village in France is that a village has a church in it and a hamlet does not.

Cold weather produce

There's not much left of the vegetable garden these days. It's time to go and pull out the wilted and rotting squash vines. That means gathering a dozen or more winter squashes and putting them in cold storage. We'll enjoy them until next summer. Walt has already made one "pumpkin" pie this fall.

We have a lot of acorn squashes, a good number of what they call potimarrons (the little orange pumpkins) in France, and a few butternut squashes. We also have half a dozen gigantic zucchinis, which our British friends call "marrows". They are good stuffed and baked, but we have eaten our fill of them since summer, so these will just go into the compost.

It's pretty cold this morning. In theory, the cold temperatures are good for the squashes, and for my collard greens (above), bringing out their natural sweetness. I'll see when I go out with the dog in an hour of so whether there is actually any frost on the ground. Today, a slight warming trend is supposed to set in, with temperatures in the high 50s and low 60s next week.

The photo above shows a sedum plant that I've had in a big planter box for 10 years now. It sits out by the garden shed. It doesn't start flowering until September, but when it finally does it looks pretty nice. Its French name seems to be sédum remarquable, and the English name "showy stonecrop" (Hylotelephium spectabile).

The last of the grapes

I don't know about where you are, but here in Saint-Aignan it has turned cold. Cold for October, anyway. We haven't had frost yet, but our high temperature today is supposed to be in the upper 40s ºF — just 9ºC. We keep thinking we should go out and clean up the rest of the garden, but we are waiting and hoping for a warm-up before we do it.

Here are some photos showing the state of the vines around us right now. I took the pictures a couple of afternoons ago. Only stray grapes remain on the vines at this stage. You can see a small bunch above, but in most of the vineyard plots the scene below is more typical. Most of the grapes have been stripped off, leaving just the skeletons of the bunches on the vines.

Often at the end of a row you see a few more grapes hanging on than farther into the vineyard plot. Depending on the plot, and the grape variety occupying it, the colors are different.

Despite what you might think looking at the bright sunlight in the photos here, we had a little bit of rain yesterday afternoon. It might rain again today. The Télématin weather report just told me that our temperatures right now would be more typical of late November or early December. It's snowing in the mountains in France, and it snowed in parts of Germany yesterday. We got our chimney swept and our boiler up and running just in time.