Rouen letter, part 2

I'm always surprised when I see old letters that I wrote or that friends wrote to me. They are long! We wrote a lot, and I guess without inexpensive telephone plans and without e-mail, snail-mail letters were our only way to communicate with friends and family.

The boulevards of Rouen near where I lived
February 2003

Rouen is about 200 miles north of Saint-Aignan. The Rouen metro area has a population of about half a million. I've spent a lot of time there over the years (see this blog topic). My October 1972 letter continues:

Thursday

My cold is almost all well now. The weather is still beautiful, though a little chilly — 45º at night, 65º in the afternoon. No clouds, no rain for exactly two weeks now...

I started moving into my apartment right after I stopped writing on Tuesday, so I’ve been busy since then. Tuesday afternoon, Monsieur Beauvallet, who did most of the work in the apartment, told me that he had bought a stove and a refrigerator for the kitchen. So looking disappointed when he told me on Monday that I wouldn’t have a fridge worked. He got the gas hooked up last night, so I’m all set. I spent about $25 yesterday buying pots, pans, glasses, dishes, silverware, etc.

Shop on the Place du Vieux Marché, Rouen

February 2003

The story of the apartment is pretty complicated, but I think I’ve finally figured it out now. As I’ve said, Madame Beauvallet is a secretary at the lycée. Her husband is evidently a tile contractor. Because of her job, they have an apartment (at no charge) in the school, as do five or six of the officials. Her parents have this big old house (they are Monsieur and Madame Lesage). They rent four small apartments, all unfurnished except this one.

The Lesages are both over 70 years old and neither is really well. He is deaf and toothless, and she is arthritic. Besides Madame Beauvallet, who must be 35, they have two retarded sons, one 21 and the other 30. They are almost helpless, have to be dressed and fed, and can’t go out on their own. They live with the old people. I figure that the Beauvallets know that when the Lesages are gone, they’ll have to keep Madame Beauvallet’s two brothers so they’ll have to give up their apartment at the school and take the house. If they have four nice furnished apartments to rent out — and considering the lack of furnished apartments in Rouen — they will have a nice little monthly income to go with what they already have.

Monsieur Beauvallet keeps telling me that he thinks it is ridiculous the way people in France live without what we consider necessities — hot water, refrigerators, adequate heat, etc. Many still don’t have any plumbing, even in the cities. But old Monsieur Lesage is set in his ways and thinks people don’t need all these frills. Monsieur Beauvallet says he would have done a lot more to fix up the apartment, but his father-in-law was against it, and he’s the boss.

Two hours later

I just came back from taking a shower at the lycée and now I’m sitting in a laundromat while my clothes get washed. It’s a laundromat full of Speed Queen washers and dryers, all fitted out to take French francs instead of quarters and dimes. Talking about American products — the country is full of them, except for American cars and trucks.

Place du Vieux Marché, Rouen

February 2003

Yesterday in a big grocery store I noticed that much of the rice is imported from the U.S. and is called “Carolina Rice.” They had Uncle Ben’s converted rice too. There was also a can of something called American Sauce for meat, poultry, and fish. No telling what’s in it! (After all, the French don’t eat French dressing. But French fries are the national dish.) Woolite is sold everywhere. I tried on a MacGregor sports jacket yesterday, but it was too expensive. Time, Newsweek, and Mad Magazine are sold in most newsstands. Coca-Cola is everywhere, Pepsi some places. Heinz ketchup too. There is a store called The English Shop that sells breakfast cereals — raisin bran, shredded wheat, etc. Rice Krispies and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Quaker Oats are in all the stores. So are Colgate-Palmolive products, and Ultra-Brite and Close-Up toothpaste.

But don’t think everything is American. Most people still shop in little stores, buying unpackaged French bread, fresh vegetables, and butchered, cut-to-order meat. Prices are about the same in America for most things...

Rouen from the corniche

August 2006

It was natural to focus on American things at the beginning of my stay. Also, I was very interested in the Beauvallets and the Lesages as a family, although I never really got to know them. I think I was very curious about their circumstances, since I had never known a French family before, despite having spent six months in Aix-en-Provence as a student two years earlier.

Unfortunately, 35 years later, fewer and fewer French people buy their food in small shops. The supermarket, or hypermarket, is now ubiquitous. Small shopkeepers can't compete, and the ones that survive do so by turning toward the selling of luxury items rather than everyday products. Nowadays, everybody has a car and can go to the supermarkets.

Le Gros Horloge — The Big Clock — in Rouen
June 2003

There are still two butcher shops in Saint-Aignan. For standard cuts of meat, their prices are about the same as the prices you see at the butcher counters in local supermarkets including Intermarché and SuperU. The quality is equivalent too — in other words, the supermarkets have butchers on staff and sell high-quality meats, cut to order. The big difference is that the supermarkets sell in volume and can run weekly specials that save consumers money.

Here's a link to part 3 of this topic about an old letter from Rouen.

An old letter from Rouen

Yesterday I was going through a box of old papers and I found a letter I wrote to my mother in 1972. She saved it and gave it back to me a couple of years ago. In 1972-73, I lived in Normandy, where I worked as a teaching assistant at a lycée in Rouen. I had been there less than a month when I wrote the letter, and I was 23 years old.

Tuesday, October 3, 1972

Dear Ma,

I came back from Paris Saturday afternoon with a bunch of American and English assistants who will be in the general area of Rouen. I caught an awful cold — which I haven’t lost yet, though it’s getting better — in Paris. Why, I don’t know. The weather has been beautiful for almost two weeks now. It didn’t rain once all the time we were in Paris.

I think I caught the cold because everybody had one, and we were all sitting crushed together in the auditoriums of the Sorbonne six or eight hours a day listening to lectures. The number of sneezes and coughs per minute from the audience gradually increased by the hour, and, combined with the nose-blowing, the sound at the last meeting on Saturday morning was nearly deafening.

I guess I’ll start moving into my apartment today. I saw it for the first time yesterday, and it’s not at all what the lady said it would be. They’ve spent a lot of money, I’m sure, fixing it up. The furniture is all brand new — bed, wardrobe, desk, dining room set, and a huge kitchen cupboard. New wallpaper and paint and curtains. Probably brand new linoleum and tile. But they spent all that money making it pretty instead of buying a $75 refrigerator, so there isn’t one.

The plumbing hasn’t been done yet, so there won’t be any hot water for about a month. They said they would put in a cooking stove in the next two or three days. Also no bathroom, although facilities are available. I’m on the second floor, and the toilet is on the third while the shower will be on the first — will be as soon as they install it. Within two weeks, they say.

At any rate, the two rooms are really big, and the location isn’t bad, so I should be OK once I get used to it. I could buy a tiny fridge for about $60, new. I’m going to start looking for some used ones. Somebody around a city of 300,000 people must sell them.

But maybe not, considering the way these people use everything, including the paper the butcher wraps meat in, over and over and over and over again. We Americans just don’t understand thrift, when it comes right down to it.

I’m going to start work on Friday, even though I started getting paid on Sunday.The school system here, both high school and university, seems to run on a minimal amount of efficient organization. It does no good to try to push things through unless you know exactly the right person to go to. And that takes years of experience, I’m sure. It’s better to just sit back and let things run their natural course in time, and something eventually will turn up.

I’ve been told that I’ll be in class 10 hours a week. At least four of those will be as an assistant to the professor in his classroom. Those are the only four hours I know about — three on Friday with one professor, from 11:00 to noon and from 2:00 to 4:00; then two hours every other Saturday morning, 8:00 to 10:00, in class with Monsieur Davoine, the head English professor...

All these years later, I was surprised to read that the weather was so nice in Normandy that fall. That's not how I remember it. I'll have to revise some of my old stories. I guess the gray, damp weather we had over the winter obliterated all memories of good September weather.

I never did get use of a working shower downstairs from that apartment. All year I had to trudge over to the lycée a couple of times a week to have a shower in the school dormitories. My memory is also that I didn't get hot water and heat until January, not in November as promised at the time. And the weather turned very cold and gray, with a constant drizzle of rain. I caught the flu and nearly died.

And the professors at the lycée, with two notable exceptions, treated me like dirt! Some of them told their students not to attend my conversation classes because they would pick up that awful American accent and vocabulary. The worst of them would constantly ask me, whenever I said anything, "But how do you say that in British English?", and then they would make fun of my pronunciation.

It was pretty miserable, actually, but I was young and excited about being in France, so it didn't matter much. The apartment was a couple of blocks from the train station in Rouen, and not more than 10 minutes' walk from the Place du Vieux Marché, the old market.

Here's a link to part 2 of this topic about the old Rouen letter.

Beefsteak with green beans

A quick topic today. I said yesterday that we were having steak with stewed onions (confit d'oignons) and green beans for lunch.

The steak is macreuse, which resembles flank or skirt steak. The onions cooked for about three hours on low heat, with some red wine, a bay leaf, and some dried thyme. Salt and pepper of course. They are the purplish mass on the platter with the two steaks, which were cooked medium-rare in a hot skillet.

The beans were frozen ones, and they were beautiful. I cooked them in boiling salted water. When they were done, I sauteed some mushrooms in butter and tossed the beans in with them. Meanwhile, I had already cooked a few potatoes in the boiling water, and then I just put them in a low oven to continue cooking and to brown a little bit while I cooked the steak and beans on top of the stove.

Much ado about nothing, really, but we don't eat beefsteak that often and this was really good. It reminded me of food you would get in a Paris café on a cold winter's day. With it we had some good Cabernet Franc red wine from the co-op (disambiguating the spelling, Claude!) in Saint-Romain. And some bread. It turned out to be a very typical French meal, I thought. One of the great pleasures of living in France is the food.

A visit to Barbier's salon

Des champignons poussent un peu partout en ce moment.

I stand corrected on the quince question. Quince trees there are in the U.S. Here's a map from Wikipedia showing the major centers of pear and quince production in the world:


I'm going to see Mme Barbier down in the village this morning. It's time for my semi-annual haircut. Well, it's a coupe semi-semestrielle visit, really. I go about four times a year. Walt went yesterday.

Then it's time to go get some wine. I'll go up to the coop in Saint-Romain-sur-Cher, about 10 km north of Saint-Aignan, to get some Cabernet Franc red, some Chardonnay white, and some rosé made from Gamay and Cab. Franc. Then we will have to bottle all that.

Autumn leaves caught in a temporary
autumn stream through the vineyard

Walt told Mme Barbier all our gossip today, so I'm not sure what she and I will have to talk about. We usually talk about all the English and American people who live around here, or who visit often. Mme Barbier seems to like to keep track of all the comings and goings.

Wet weather means mushrooms growing in the yard

What's for lunch? Biftek et haricots verts. Pan-seared flank steak with a side of green beans. And also a little confit d'oignons. That's slow-cooked onions and could be called stewed onions I think.

It's cold this morning: 1ºC or 34ºF. Walt is taking Callie out. The weather is turning colder and drier. Good.

Food, partly

Before I talk about food, answering a question posed by Susan in a comment, I want to say this about the bidet: Claude said she had the bidet removed from her salle de bains because, basically, it was a waste of space. I can understand that.

Ours is too, in practical terms. It's just another bathroom fixture you have to wipe and scrub down to keep it clean, and the only thing it ever gets used for is washing out a pair of socks or drawers. (TMI?) But our bathroom is big, so we don't particularly need the space the bidet takes up.

Our plumber, Monsieur Rougemont, advised us to have it taken out. He also advised us to have the bathtub taken out when we had a nice new shower stall put in. We never officially use the bathtub either, though it is a good place to set big potted plants when you want to wash the dust off their leaves. Sometimes the plants stand there in the bathtub for days or weeks on end. They get good afternoon light through the bathroom window, and they are not in anyone's way.

Rip this out?

Now I think Rougemont is a good man, and I know from experience that he is an excellent plumber. But taking out the bidet and the bathtub would be money in his pocket and money out of mine. In California, real estate people told us it would be really hard to sell a house that didn't have a bathtub in at least one bathroom. I don't know if that applies here in France.

I think French people (plumbers, anyway) might have gotten over-enthusiastic in the modernization of the country's bathrooms. Back when, it was a luxury to have a bathtub. As Marie-Antoinette might have said, "The people don't have bathtubs? Let them take showers!"

As for the bidet, we are keeping it for old times' sake. It's one more thing that reminds us every day that we really are in France. I've seen bidets in American bathrooms, but there aren't many (unless they are putting them in all the McMansions being built pretty much everywhere now).

By the way, it was five years ago yesterday that we first laid eyes on the house we live in now. We knew it would be a good house for us from the moment we saw it. It is. Five years!

Oh, food. Well, what was for lunch yesterday was pizza. Walt made the crust using Evelyn's bread dough recipe, which includes a little bit of honey and a little bit of sugar along with flour, yeast, salt, and a little olive oil. He said the dough was just beautiful, and he let it rise overnight in the refrigerator before making the pizza the next day.

Pizza pie, 10 December 2007

I have to say it was very good pizza. The toppings were tomato puree, lardons, mushrooms, a sprinkle of dried thyme, and un bon peu de mozzarella cheese. The crust was puffy, light, and crispy. Another success.

Did I tell you about the quince trees? Our neighbors had — yes, had — three of them, and I made many quarts of delicious quince jelly two, three, and even four years ago. Most of that jelly is gone now, and there may well be no more.

One of the neighbors' quince trees just up and died. Another was looking puny, so the neighbors had it cut down. They kept, however, the big tree that produced the most fruit.

Le défunt cognassier de chez nos voisins

Now that one has expired. It blew over in a gust of wind. To my untrained eye, it looks to have had it. There was some talk of trying to save it, but I've seen no follow-through.

Alors, il n'y aura plus de coings dans le coin. En matière de confiture, ce sera de la gelée de pommes pour notre pomme.

L'endroit secret

Over the past few months, I've read this little piece of advice several times on different web sites and blogs: after you've done your business, lower the toilet seat before you flush. If you don't, the fine spray of water the the flush sends up and out can contaminate toothbrushes as far as ten feet away.

My first question is: Don't people rinse their toothbrushes in a stream of running water before they put toothpaste on them and stick them in their mouths? I know I do. And I prefer hot water, but some people don't, evidently.

Here at our house in Saint-Aignan, we don't have to worry about toilet spray contaminating our toothbrushes. Our toilet is in a separate room from our, and I use this alternate term advisedly, "bathing room." That's how most (but not all) French dwellings are set up.

In many ways, it's very practical. We have, in effect, what is called "a half-bath" in America, plus another bathroom, which is not really a full bathroom because there's no toilet in it. In fact, we don't have a term to describe such a room in current American English. I suggest "bathing-room."

In San Francisco, we had one full bath (with bathtub, sink, and toilet) and one three-quarters bath (with shower stall, sink, and toilet, but no bathtub) in our house. The bathing-room in our Saint-Aignan house doesn't qualify as a full bath or a three-quarters. The fixtures in it are a shower stall, a bathtub, and a sink. Oh, and a bidet. It really is a room for bathing.

Something about having the toilet in a separate room, the WC, is peculiarly European, I think (even though the half-bath is not uncommon in America). Sometimes the French WC is a room with just a toilet, and sometimes it includes a toilet and a sink, or lave-mains (a "hand-wash") — what somebody I know once described as a "boat sink" because of its diminutive size.

For French people this room has a name, but they
pretend it doesn't exist. We Americans admit that
it exists but we don't really have an everyday name for it.

Having a separate room where you go to use the toilet means it is clear what you plan to do when you go in there. That might go against some of our more Victorian American conventions. It's not hypocritical enough. When you "go to the bathroom" in American English, in one sense it is clear that you intend to urinate (or worse!) but you don't have to actually 'fess up. Maybe you in fact just intend to freshen up, or wash your hands, or check to see if you have any lettuce stuck in your teeth. To powder your nose, as it were.

"Going to the bathroom" becomes a very confusing expression in our house in Saint-Aignan. "Are you going to the bathroom?" I might ask.

"Yes, I'm going to brush my teeth." Oh, that bathroom.

"Are you in the bathroom? I need to go... but I can wait."

"Yes, I'm in the bathroom, but go ahead. I'm just trimming my mustache." Or whatever. Not going to the bathroom, in other words.

How many of our American visitors have gone into our bathroom
only to find themselves unable to locate the fixture they
were looking for? Don't use this one. It's a bidet.

I don't know what to call the water-closet in American English. "The toilet" sounds too direct, almost harsh, too functional. "The half-bath" sounds like the description in a real-estate brochure. "The loo" sounds too twee. "The throne room" is the best I've come up with. We are in château country, after all.

We could just pretend it doesn't exist. I think French people do that in polite society. For example, they always close the door, even when the room is unoccupied. Years ago, I used to be invited regularly to Sunday dinners at the apartment of a French woman in Paris. After apéritifs, wine, and coffee, I invariably had to go to "the bathroom." When I had flushed the toilet and left the room, I left the door open just a crack. It's an old habit; seeing the door slightly ajar lets the next person know that the room is not occupied.

The hostess would listen carefully to determine whether I had closed that door all the way. After a minute or two, she would quietly get up from her chair, in the middle of whatever conversation we all were having or whatever TV program we were watching, and go close it. She couldn't stand it. You could hear it click closed when she walked back there. She didn't use the room; she just shut the door. And I would always think, damn, I again forgot to close the door all the way. It had to be tightly closed, always. Who know what horrible germs or smells might have escaped into the house otherwise.

When I went to take a picture of the bidet, Callie came to see what
I was up to. She doesn't really understand what a bidet is for either.

The other thing that makes me believe that French people would like to pretend the WC doesn't exist is that in calculating the square footage (well, meterage) of your apartment or house, you are not allowed to include the throne room. I think you can include the salle de bains, however, and the kitchen. The WC has its own special status. It is invisible; technically, it doesn't exist. It's not part of the surface habitable, the living space.

Some also say it is just not proper to ask to use the bathroom (let's be clear — d'aller aux toilettes) at someone else's house when you are, say, invited to dinner. You just have to hold it. On prend ses dispositions to avoid such awkward situations. I've heard other French people poo-poo the whole bathroom interdiction thing, however.

Why is it plural, anyway? You say les toilettes. La toilette is something else entirely. And les WC or les vécés. Or les waters, also spelled les vatères. Les gogues. J'en passe et des meilleures.

An Englishwoman we know said an Englishman we also know might have a hard time selling his house in France to French buyers because in remodeling it he put the toilet in the same room with the shower, tub, and sink. French people wouldn't like that. It would seem strange. It's not what they are used to. It's more English-style.

In fact, more and more often you see that configuration in French dwellings. All the way back in the 1970s, one suburban Paris apartment I lived in had that bathroom configuration. The fixtures had obviously been installed as a kind of afterthought, in a very small (should I say wee?) space. A closet. Whatever. It worked for me.

And all along I thought the English went to the loo, which is the anglicized pronounciation of les lieux, meaning that unnamed place where the facilities are located. The toilet — that's the polite British term, I've been led to believe. No restrooms over there.

Try to remember

Sometimes I stop myself and ask, "Why exactly did you start this blog?"

And guess what — I do remember. Back when I lived in cities in France — Aix-en-Provence, Rouen, Grenoble, Metz, and, mostly, Paris — I made my living working as a teacher and, incidentally, a supervisor of American study-abroad programs.

Winter sunrise, 08 December 2007

I taught English in France, but in the U.S. and even once or twice in France, I taught French to American students. Grammar, vocabulary, verb conjugations, and pronunciation. Or syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology, if you prefer. And also culture. As we said back then, both Culture (high-brow) and culture (everyday life).

As a very young man, I ended up living in France for seven years between 1970 and 1982. That means I also spent five years in the U.S. during that period, most of them in graduate school in Illinois preparing advanced degrees in French literature and linguistics, working at the headquarters of the national association of French teachers, and teaching French to university students.

New day dawning

Sitting out on the prairie in Illinois, then, back in the late 1970s, I would sometimes dream of a life in which I lived in France permanently — ideally in Paris — and in which I would supplement whatever income I had by being being a kind of "foreign correspondent" for American teachers and students of French.

I thought I might write and somehow distribute a weekly or even daily column or article describing current events in France, cultural differences between France and America, and interesting language tidbits. Back then, the time lag between events and trends in France and the time they became known in America seemed years long. Students needed the motivation of fresh news and information from France. That was before personal computers and the World Wide Web existed. In fact, it was a luxury just to have a telephone in France back then, and I lived without one for years.

The cluster of old houses that is the core of the hamlet
called La Renaudière, near Saint-Aignan

I did end up living in Paris for three years at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, but I never became that foreign correspondent. Distribution of the information was the show-stopper. I had to move back to the U.S., to Washington DC, to accomplish my "journalism" goal, and then I was writing about American culture for an audience of French-speaking Africans. Unfortunately, I had never set foot in Africa, and the focus on America wasn't what I wanted. Not only that, but I had to adhere to the Republican party line, since I worked for the federal government while Ronald Reagan was president and right-wing ideology was king.

Callie among the vines

Two years ago, Walt and I had been living in Saint-Aignan for two years already. When he discovered and told me about blogging, I set up Living the Life in Saint-Aignan immediately. I think that old idea of sending real-time snippets of French life, language, and culture back to the U.S. was still in the back of my mind. Of course, the audience I had in mind for the blog was old friends in California and other places in the U.S., including my family. But I figured other people would soon discover the blog — and many have. I'm up to close to 50,000 visits in a little less than two years of posting.

Problem is, I don't live in a city any more. I live out in the middle of the country. I don't interact with very many French people. I'm way outside the mainstream in many ways. I don't work for a living, so I don't have work events and interactions to write about. I don't travel much.

The people I do interact with here in Saint-Aignan with are friends and acquaintances who might know about the blog, and I don't want to violate their privacy by talking about the details of their lives and the quirks of their personalities on a blog.

A little house at La Renaudière

So here I am, executing on an old plan and wondering why. That's all. And here are some more nature shots of my days in the vineyard. Can you stand it?

What made me think of all this, in part, was a telephone conversation last night with our old friend Cheryl in California. I was describing some recent people and events to her, and I realized once again that many of the most interesting people and events all around me are ones that I just can't feel comfortable about describing on the blog.

One more picture of that sunrise

I'm still aware of the huge differences between life and people in France compared to life and people in the U.S. But how to describe them? I guess if you could easily explain such things, there wouldn't be much point in living through them.

Willful, defiant dogs get better

Callie weighs 14 kg now — 31 lbs. That's not as big as Collette was — that dog's adult weight varied from 16 to 18 kg — but Callie is not yet 10 moths old. I assume she will put on another three or four kilos next year.

I've been back in France for nearly three weeks now, after an absence of just more than three weeks. Callie really tested me when I got back. She must have missed me. And she obviously didn't enjoy the all-day ride in the car with Walt to pick me up at the airport when I got back. That night, she peed and pooped on the kitchen floor. My first clue...

Callie headed for the loose soil of the garden plots

For days, the dog was willful and uncooperative. She played rough, biting me more than before, and refused to obey any commands. She did all the things we've tried to get her to stop doing: jumping up on the kitchen counters, taking food out of the garbage can, eating charcoal out of the fireplace, splashing in cold mud puddles outdoors. For me, the last straw was when she rolled in something putrid on one morning's walk.

That was the day we had it out. After another bath, she had breakfast. Then she decided that a rug I had just put back down in the living room, after rescuing it from her teeth when she was just a puppy, would make a good plaything. She had the rug all bunched up in a ball, and I thought she was chewing holes in it (she wasn't, it turned out).

Her reaction when I said No, Get Out of There

I talked to her very sternly that morning — no, I'll admit it, I screamed at her. I threatened her that I would take her to the pound (as if she understood!), and I rued the day she first darkened our door last May. I needed a bon coup de gueule — a loud rant — and I needed to reassert my leadership, my rank in the pack, in a way she wouldn't forget. It was deafeningly vocal and it seems to have worked.

Callie can still be willful, of course. Yesterday afternoon we were out in the back yard. We had come in from a walk in the lower part of the vineyard, not far from the house. She was soaking wet, because the ground is squishy wet (it's supposed to rain again this afternoon).

The dog headed straight for the tilled-up garden plots. I was trying to play frisbee with her, but the loose soil of the garden was more attractive. She was going to roll or dig, or both. I called her and said No! Get Away From There! She heard me. She looked at me defiantly and took off running. In circles. Playing. She knew what she was doing.

Why did I take Callie to walk in the lower vineyard and not out on the gravel road that runs through the upper vineyard? Well, it's because of That Woman and Her Dog Lili. I don't like seeing them any more than Walt does, and they seem to be out there every afternoon. The nerve of them, invading "our" vineyard the way they've done. I wish they would move back to Paris (no, it's not the same people).

The lower vineyard, site of our afternoon exile

First of all, Callie and Lili take off together and disappear from view for long minutes. I stand around calling Callie, but she doesn't come back. I'm afraid she'll end up out on the paved road, where The Woman and Lili live, and in front of a car. And when she finally does feel like coming back, she's a muddy, tangled mess. She has to have a full bath when we get home, and giving her a full bath every day is not my idea of Quality Time spent with her.

Besides, the woman who walks with Lili is so boring. We have nothing to say to each other, and we always end up standing around or walking together for a good part of the time I'm outdoors. That also is not my idea of Quality Time in the Vineyard. I'd rather be walking briskly, for the exercise, or taking pictures. Thinking my own thoughts. Keeping tabs on Callie's activities.

So now I avoid the main part of the vineyard in the afternoon. Callie and I still go out there in the morning. In fact, Callie is standing here vocalizing her desire to go walking right now. Now's the time...

Stormy weather

Yesterday morning I headed out with the dog at about 8:00 in the morning. That's before sunrise, but it's light enough that I'm not afraid of losing sight of Callie, who likes to run through all the rows of vines and doesn't always stay close.

I had looked outside and it was gray and gloomy. It had rained, but the rain had stopped, at least temporarily. I was really surprised to see a beautiful sunrise just a few minutes later.

Sunrise at La Renaudière, 06 December 2007

The sky was red, as you can see (good thing there aren't many sailors around here), and the red light was reflecting off the trimmed vine branches, which already have kind of a reddish hue.

The Renaudie vineyards under a red sunrise

The whole red sunrise lasted less than 5 minutes. I walked a few more steps out into the vineyard and everything suddenly turned gray again. New rainclouds were moving in. There were just a few breaks in the clouds during the morning hours, but by noon it had started raining.

These are the contraptions that the vineyard workers use
to burn clippings as they prune the vines this time of year.

The weather turned stormy yesterday afternoon but it's not cold at all. The low this morning was 12ºC/55ºF. The low! This weather front has come in off the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The wind has been blustery, and raindrops pelt the windows and drip down. It's dark, even during daylight hours. December! What do you expect?

Minutes after that red sunrise began,
the landscape looked like this again.

Two weeks from today we will hit the low point as far as hours of daylight go. It will officially be winter then, but the days will start lengthening. Last year it was really cold at Christmas. Maybe it will snow this year.

Les Parisiens

Monday and Wednesday were rainy, but Tuesday afternoon the sun came out for a few hours. It was about 2:30 when I looked out the back window and saw the Parisians.

Our neighbors the Parisians

You don't see them very often. They live three houses down from us, on the same side of the road. They have a nice, well-maintained house, similar to ours. I don't think they have a car. But they have frequent visitors, judging from the cars parked outside on the road; I assume they are health-care people and house cleaning staff of one sort or another.

I call them « les Parisiens » because that's how another neighbor referred to them one day. I wonder how long they've lived at La Renaudière. Longer than we have, I know that, and that'll soon be five years.

For the record, here's how the back garden looks these days.

I've talked to M. le Parisien only once, and never to Madame. It was the day our old dog Collette chased le chat des Parisiens into the bushes across the road from their house. "Your dog chased my cat," M. le Parisien said to me, more as an observation than a reproach.

"The dog is pretty old," I told him, "and at the age of 12 she won't be able to catch the cat anyway." M. le Parisien shrugged his shoulders and turned away to go back into his house. He had been out checking his mailbox.

When we see the Parisians, we always say « Bonjour ! » but that's as far as it goes.

Cheese — ba-a-ah!

Here's another page from the Centre E. Leclerc's latest advertising brochure. It's for cheese(s), but can you tell what all these cheeses have in common?


They have nice names like Le Pérail des Aliziers, Ossau Iraty, Manchego, Tommette, Etorki, and Roquefort. Ah, Roquefort. There's a familiar one.

It turns out all these cheeses are made with ewe's milk. The ewe is the female sheep, like the cow is the female bovine. So not only do we eat lamb, but we eat cheese made from the lamb's mother's milk. Did you know that Roquefort cheese was made from ewe's milk?

This they don't have in common: some of the cheeses are made with raw milk (lait cru) and others are made with pasteurized milk (lait pasteurisé). Purists will say that cheese made from raw milk is better than cheese made with pasteurized milk.

Another thing these cheeses have in common is that they are all made in southwestern France or, in at least one case, northeastern Spain. A couple are from the Aveyron region, including Roquefort. The others are made in Basque country, which the bottom left corner of France when you look at the map.

Southwestern France. French Basque country is the basically
the Pyrénées Atlantiques, the green area at the bottom left
of the map, on the border with Spain and south of Bordeaux.
The Averyon is a bright blue area just north and east of Toulouse.

The French word for ewe is brebis (bruh-BEE). If it's in the feminin (la brebis), it means the animal itself. If it's in the masculin, le brebis, it means the cheese (le fromage de brebis ;c'est du brebis). That's because the word fromage is masculin.

As for the prices, I'll just say that 10.00€/kg is about $6.81/lb at today's exchange rates. That would make 15.00€/kg about $10.00/lb.

Duck!

The Leclerc hypermarket (superstore) chain is having a Festival of Fat! Duck fat. They are selling off the ducks that were fattened this year for foie gras production, along with the foie gras. It's an annual affair — or fair, as it were.


If you live in Saint-Aignan, the closest Leclerc stores are in Amboise, Romorantin, and Loches, all about a half-hour's drive. We don't have hypermarkets in Saint-Aignan, although they are now finishing up a significant expansion of our SuperU market.

So what duck products can you get from Leclerc? If you hurry...

Gésiers, gizzards — 5.95€/kg ($3.98/lb)

Cœurs, hearts — 3.50€/kg ($2.35/lb)

Aiguillettes, tenders — 11.67€/kg ($7.98/lb)

Cuisses, leg & thigh sections — 3.55€/kg ($2.37/lb)

Manchons, wing sections — 1.90€/kg ($1.27/lb)

Magret, breast — 10.45€/kg ($6.98/lb)

Foie gras tout venant, standard-grade liver — 24.95€/kg ($16.67/lb)

Foie gras extra, choice liver — 30.95€/kg ($20.68/lb)

Isn't it interesting that gizzards cost so much more than wings or thighs? You'd expect duck breast to cost more, and you'd certainly expect foie gras to be expensive. And tenders, a choice morsel. They are very good sauteed and then served with a cream sauce.

Actually, the ad is a little slick when it comes to this last cut of duck, the aiguillettes. It lists a price of 3.50€, which would be too good to be true. You have to read the fine print to find out that the tenders are sold in a 300-gram package for that price. The price per kilogram is much higher — 11.67€. Shopper beware.

What do you do with duck gizzards? You cook them very slowly in renderd duck fat until they are completely tender, no longer rubbery. That's the process that produces confit, and it's the same thing you do with leg, thigh, and wing sections to make what is called confit de canard. Then you drain the gizzards or other pieces of duck on a rack until all the fat drips off and put them in a hot oven to brown for a few minutes.

The gizzards are especially good served on a bed of salad with some tomato wedges, other salad vegetables, and a good vinaigrette dressing.

I'm not sure what you do with the hearts. I assume they would be tough like gizzards and benefit from slow cooking to make a confit de cœurs, but I see some recipes on the web where they are just put on a skewer and cooked quickly on a barbecue grill.

In a separate flyer, Leclerc advertises the whole canard gras — legs, thighs, wings, breasts, and tenders, but no gizzards or hearts — for 3.51/kg (2.35/lb).

The duck livers on sale here are raw, so you have to cook them. To do so, you press them into a terrine or loaf pan and cook them very slowly in a low oven until they are cooked through. Then you slice the liver and eat it on slices of toasted bread, preferably French pain de campagne.

What's happening?

It seems like I don't have the flu. I don't know what is going on, and why I felt so terrible yesterday. This morning, tout va bien.

I'm "decorating" this post with some pictures I took
last Friday, when the sun was out over the vineyard.

As for the hibernation, I've decided just to let it run its course. I've always been somebody who got up early in the morning. When I used to teach, I would always ask for the 8:00 classes, because not only was I up and ready by that hour, but I felt better, and my teaching day was over early. I also enjoyed the people who chose to come to class at that early hour.

Now I find myself sleeping until 8:00 or 9:00 nearly every morning. As I've said, part of it is because it's so dark. The sun comes up at about 8:30. Besides, the bedroom shutters are closed, so it really is dark in there.

A late-November sky in Touraine, around 4:00 p.m.

Yesterday, all the shutters were closed, all around the house. That's because we had a big windstorm in northern France. We must have had 40 mph winds with 50 mph gusts during the afternoon and evening. It was worse in Brittany and up on the Normandy coast. The TV news last night showed waves crashing on rocks and jetties and sea walls from the tip of Brittany up to Dieppe in Normandy. People were leaning into the strong wind and being pelted with raindrops.

Here at La Renaudière, when we have weather like yesterday's, we close all the shutters. Partly it's a precaution, but the closed shutters also help insulate the house and keep the rain off the windows. If a big tree branch does break off and go flying, it won't end up crashing through a window.

Warm sun on an old vine-covered stone wall

We had just over half an inch of rain (16 mm). That's not much, but everything was already very wet. This morning, the sun is out. The winds have died down, though I was vaguely aware of rain and some wind gusts early this morning, two or three hours before I actually sprang out ... er, hauled myself ... out of bed.

What's going on in France these days besides windstorms? Well, a lot of the news is about rising prices. And I've noticed higher prices at the supermarket compared to September, that's for sure. Milk, butter, chicken have all gone up, for example.

The hamlet called La Renaudière off in the distance

The Sarkozy/Fillon government has a plan to fight high prices. Fillon, the prime minister, announced last night that he was proposing legislation to let workers more easily put in overtime hours. "Work more to earn more" is the theme of this administration.

Of course, the Sarkozy people never point out that they can't force employers to let workers work overtime hours. Or that employers who ask their staff to work longer hours will end up hiring fewer new workers, so unemployment is bound to go up. That seems logical.

They make it sound like an employee who works the standard 35-hour week just has to tell his boss that he wants to work overtime and that will be that. I don't think it works that way, does it?

Here's what to do on a Sunday: take a walk

in a vineyard. Or a park. Wherever.

The other big thing is work on Sunday. Employees at an Ikea store near Paris were featured working a Sunday shift. They all said they were volunteers, and that Ikea employees who don't want to work on Sunday don't have to. That also doesn't sound realistic to me. If your boss wants you to work on Sunday, and you say you are against it as a principle, what do you think that does to the way you are viewed by your boss? And your career prospects? What if your boss decides he can't do without you on Sundays?

Sarkozy would like people to work all the time. That's my impression. What ever happened to all the leisure time that was promised to us in the 20th century? Is work the point of life? Do all the stores really need to be open on Sundays? And 365 days a year? I know they are in America, but is that the future for workers in all the countries in the world? I guess that for the forces of capitalism, work is the opiate of the masses.

What's the matter?

I've been back in Saint-Aignan for just less than two weeks now, and I'm starting to realize that I've been kind of depressed. Now I'm trying to figure out why. The symptoms: sleeping 10 or even 11 hours a night, having little interest for things that interested me before, feeling tired most of the time, and — worst of all — being slightly off my food.

Out in the vineyard under a pale sun

Okay, I know that a lot of it has been jet lag. But this time it fooled me. After other trips to the U.S., the main symptoms of jet lag have always been the inability to go to sleep at night (bedtime in France being afternoon or early evening on the East Coast), and waking up at 4:00 a.m. for several days, without being able to go back to sleep.

The vines on a bright day in winter

This time, I went to bed at my normal time every night, and then I proceeded to sleep like a log for 10 or 11 hours, waking up at 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. I've never been one to sleep such long hours.

The fact is, the sun goes down so early in Saint-Aignan this time of year, and rises so late in the morning, that it's easy to fall into a kind of hibernation. A recent opinion article in the New York Times (you have to log in to read it, but it's free), which talked about President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to get French people to work longer hours, and maybe do away with the 35-hour workweek altogether, said about the rhythm of life in France 200 years ago:

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the [French] countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In my case, I think it was the sudden contrast that affected me most. On the coast of North Carolina, which is as far south as Morocco and just about as sunny, the days had been longer, and my body and mind had gotten used to that rhythm.

Reflections off our little pond out back — compare
this to the blue-water photos I took in N.C. last month

And it's not just the length of the daylight hours, I think. It's the quality of the light. On the N.C. coast, which is effectively subtropical because of the proximity of the Gulf Stream, there is at least as much water as land everywhere you go. The sun shines brightly, the sky is blue, and the blue water of the wide rivers, the expansive sounds, and the endless ocean constitutes a second sky. All that sunlight is reflected back on itself and the effect is almost blinding.

Callie catching a ray wherever she can

In Saint-Aignan, the only significant body of water is the Cher River, and it is never more than 100 meters wide. It is shaded by big trees in many places. It can't reflect much, especially since the wintertime sky runs the full gamut of colors from dark gray to light gray to white to just the palest of blues. It's dark here in November and December.

I think it was Thursday evening when I realized how much the light had been affecting me. We were having friends over, so we cleaned and straightened up the house and turned on most of our lamps to make the place inviting. Usually, we live in relative darkness during the winter. I suddenly felt more cheerful. And then the next day the sun came out. Not like in the tropics, that's for sure, but there were actually shadows when I took the dog out for a walk in the afternoon.

Old vines

Jet lag also explains my long-lasting fatigue and general listlessness, I think. What I can't figure out is why I've been off the food. You know I love to cook and eat. Walt said a couple of days ago, when I pointed out that my appetite has been feeble, that he has really been enjoying the food: vegetable soup, leg of lamb, cabbage with smoked meats, oven-fried chicken with a parmesan crust, and beef tacos. I guess I'll just have to keep cooking and try to coax my body and mind into enjoying good food again.

Tacos

The tacos we had for lunch yesterday were really good. Walt made some Mexican-style corn tortillas. We put together a roasted-tomato salsa with chipotle peppers. We seared some steak and onions. There were beans too, and lettuce and grated cheese.

Pan-sear some beefsteak or cook some chicken
breast and then slice it across the grain.

Pan-roasted onions and seared flank or skirt steak ready for tacos

Tacos and beans — make your own right at the table.

Eating lunch was a little like being on vacation in an exotic locale. The spiciness was just the thing to ward off the chill that has settled on Saint-Aignan these last few days and weeks.

Mexican cooking on a gray day

Beef marinating in just a thin coating of pureed chipotle peppers

The weather has been gray and drizzly, which is normal for this time of year. To put some spice into our otherwise dreary existence, we thought some Mexican food might be in order. Armed with a couple of Rick Bayless cookbooks and the provisions I bought at the « El Mercadito » grocery in my North Carolina home town last month, we are making tacos this morning.

Chipotle peppers — smoked and surprisingly hot
(je veux dire très piquants)

One of the most important ingredients is a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Others are fresh tomatoes (available at the supermarché, for what they are worth), garlic, onions, beef, and of course corn tortillas. Walt is making those, using masa harina that I also brought back from the N.C.

Pan-roasting tomatoes and garlic to make
a salsa using hot, smoky chipotle peppers

I made a salsa and a pot of black beans that I seasoned with onions, garlic, duck fat (!), chopped cayenne peppers, tomato purée, and a couple of tablespoons of smoked paprika. The Bayless recipe called for bacon, and French lardons fumés would have been perfect, but I didn't have any in the fridge. So I used the duck fat instead. I have quarts of that, literally.

Black beans cooked slowly in water with no seasoning or salt,
then spiced up when they are tender and ready to eat

The beef I got at SuperU is a cut called macreuse (€7,50/kg on special). It looks like flank steak. I plan to sear it quickly in a hot skillet, let it rest for a few minutes under foil so the heat spreads through the meat but it remains rare. That's called carne asada, I think. Then I'll cut it across the grain into strips to put on the tacos along with some pan-roasted onion slices. Well, that's what Rick Bayless says to do, and who am I to argue. Maybe I'll have some more pictures later.