Limping home

There I was 40 miles from home in gusty, rainy weather, unable to park the car chez Ikea, and with the prospect of being unable to drive it home. I don't have a cell phone so I'd need to find a pay phone or a service station where I could call my insurance company for towing back to Saint-Aignan. Walt doesn't have a car to come and fetch me with in an emergency.

CHM, I think you are right —
that must be my reflection in the grapes.

Every time I turned a corner in the parking garage and on the road out to the Ikea exit, around that car-clogged traffic circle, I heard a grinding, rattling sound from under the hood. My first thought was that I wanted to get out of Tours and back to Saint-Aignan ASAP. My second was that it might be the water pump going kaput, so I'd better watch my engine temperature. The car has nearly 90,000 miles on it (141,000 km).

I got out on the road and started driving east, away from the center of Tours. Everything was going along just fine. I breathed a sigh of relief as I left the suburbs behind and got closer to Bléré, which seems like home compared to the hustling and bustling big city.

Autumn leaves collecting in puddles

At Bléré, the road turns south to cross the Cher and make a big loop around the town. As I turned south, heading directly into a strong wind, the car engine suddenly emitted a bluh-bluh-luh-luh sound like a half-inflated balloon on the spokes of some kid's bicycle wheel. "Here we go," I thought, slowing down. "Where is there a turnout?" I didn't want to stop on the Bléré bypass with my left wheels on the edge of the pavement. A car from Paris flashed his headlights behind me and then roared past, probably muttering profanities about the country bumpkins on the road down here. I could almost read his lips:
« Magne-toi le cul, pépé ! Et que ça grouille ! »

But the booming, flapping noise stopped and I just kept driving, slowly. Twenty miles to go. Ten. Five. I turned off the highway at Pouillé and followed the little road over to Mareuil. I urgently needed to make a pit stop, and I also needed to buy some wine. It had occurred to me that the next day was a holiday, le 11 novembre, Armistice Day. No wonder Ikea had been under siege. A lot of people take the Monday before a Tuesday holiday off work, "bridging" the holiday into a long weekend. (The Beaver, I'm sure you got that exactly right. What had I been thinking?)

Fortunately, I had some entertainment on the way home. On France Inter radio, they were running a segment about what they called (my French spelling) les guiques. The interviewer said she imagined them as pimply-faced teenagers or young men with thick-lensed eyeglasses and few social skills who spend all their time in front of their computer monitor. The guest named, for example, George Lucas and even Steven Spielberg as now-famous guiques, and said guiques were no longer the object of scorn and derision. They are "cool" now. Sometimes the people on the radio pronounced the final -s of the word guiques, making it sound foreign, but mostly they treated it as a French word, where the final -s is silent.

Over the past three weeks we've had about 5 inches of rain...

It had occurred to me as well that my mechanic's garage and a lot of other stores would be closed that day, Monday, and the next, the real holiday. When I got there, I stopped on the main square in Mareuil, where there's a new public toilet. And then I walked over to the village grocery store, a.k.a. la supérette, to get some wine. It was closed. Merde. My plan had been to buy the wine, get the car home if I could, and then hang tight until Wednesday, when businesses would be open again.

The car started up normally, and I drove the last two miles toward home. I turned in at the Domaine de la Renaudie, our neighbors' winery, figuring maybe Patricia would be there and open for business. Bruno was just leaving in the LWV (little white van) that sports the winery's logo, and he gave a friendly wave.

Patricia came out of her kitchen into the wine-tasting room and I blurted out my story about Ikea and not finding parking and hearing weird noises under the hood of my car. She just walked up to me with a big smile, turned her cheek, and, on tiptoes because I'm a lot taller than she is, initiated la bise, the French cheek-kisses greeting. I was taken by surprise.

...and mushrooms are growing everywhere

We've known Patricia and Bruno for more than five years, but until now Patricia's greeting had always been a business-like handshake. A few months ago — last spring — Bruno and I started saying tu to each other rather than vous, marking a change toward a more relaxed friendliness in our relationship. It was his decision. But Patricia had continued saying vous to me and shaking my hand in greeting. So her bises were especially significant.

Hearing my tale of woe about Ikea, she just shook her head with a look of resignation. Then she broke into that big smile again. « Mais c'est Obama qui a gagné ! » she said. It was like, "What else could matter? Obama won the election!" I think that's why I got the warmer greeting. Maybe Americans can now expect a friendlier reception. We are interesting and sympathiques again. Thank you, Barack Obama, and all the people who voted for you.

I continued my route home with a 10-liter bag-in-box of wine in the car and a smile on my face.

* * *

The problem with the car turns out to be some kind of splash or mud guard that has come loose under the motor. It's supposed to cover the bottom of the engine compartment. I probably scraped it loose the last time I drove on the rutted gravel road through the vineyard.

The noises I was hearing from under the hood were, first, that plastic shield scraping against the tires when I turned the steering wheel, and then the wind catching it and making it flap as I drove home in the storm. It's not a big deal, I think. I have to go get it fixed today or tomorrow — whenever I decide to go out again.

It's approa... no, encroaching

Boy was I stupid yesterday. (No wisecracks please.) I decided to go back to Ikea in Tours. Walt was smart and stayed home.

When I say in my title that it is "encroaching," I mean what passes for civilization in the wider world beyond Saint-Aignan. Shopping. Big-box stores. The Ikea megacenter in Tours is the prime example. A week or two ago when we were in Blois we saw, for another example, that the big Auchan hypermarket there will soon open in even more spacious quarters, which will include a whole new shopping mall, from the looks of the place. On the west and the north, Saint-Aignan is being hemmed in by the 21st century.

A prunus tree in our back garden on November 4

When we were at Ikea last Thursday, however, the store had piles of hundreds — no, thousands — of little 36"x24" cotton throw rugs in different colors and patterns for €1.99 each. We bought three of them, plus a bigger cotton rug that will be perfect in one of our bathrooms.

I had reverse buyer's remorse over the weekend. I wished we had bought half a dozen more of those little cotton rugs. You can never have too many throw rugs on the cold tile floors we have pretty much throughout the house, and especially in the main bathroom in winter. I also wished I had bought another one of the bigger rugs (at €9.99) in green, for our main bathroom as well.

The same prunus on Nov. 10

Since I had another couple of stores I needed to visit over in Tours, and since I needed to go out to the supermarket anyway, I thought I might as well make the drive over to Ikea and get the rugs too. It takes about an hour to drive to Tours from here, along the south bank of the Cher River past Montrichard and Chenonceaux to Bléré, then across the river and along the north bank of the river past St-Martin-le-Beau, La Bourdaisière, La Ville aux Dames, and St-Pierre-des-Corps. It was windy and threatening rain, but the drive was fine and I arrived at the Ikea store at about 10:20.

Now when we were at Ikea last Thursday, which was the first day that schools re-opened after the Toussaint holidays, the store was by our standards a mob scene. But we found parking easily — there must be 5,000 or even 10,000 spaces in the close-in and outlying lots all around the gigantic blue Ikea building — and we managed to looked through the store as we had planned to do. We congratulated ourselves for waiting until schools were back in session, figuring crowds were smaller than they might have been.

November vineyard scenes

We are not used to crowds any more and it was exhausting to have to step around and over so many shoppers in the aisles and display areas of the store. People were huddled in little crowds, blocking passageways, to ooh and aah over the color of this or the price of that. And I noticed couples squabbling with each other over whether it was a good idea to buy this thingamajig or that bobble. It was tense, and Walt and I were starting to get short with each other too. It was time to get out of there, and so we did.

Nothing could have prepared me to the sight I saw upon arrival at Ikea yesterday, though. And I never even made it into the store. Long lines of cars inched their way along two access roads to get to the parking lots. Negotiating the traffic circle at the entrance I chose was taking your life, or at least the fenders of the car, into your own hands.

The Renaudière vineyards in November

I nosed the Peugeot into a long line of creeping cars. Other cars, with drivers as clever and nefarious as French drivers can be, were racing down rows in the outdoor parking lot to get ahead of those of us who were in line on the outer access road and then forcing their way back into the line farther up. Nerve they do not lack.

I finally made it into the covered parking area and drove around it a couple of times, up and down the rows, with no luck. There just weren't any spaces. Besides all the cars racing around desperately seeking parking, there were hundreds of people on foot up and down the rows who had parked in the outer lots and were making the long trek to the store entrance. It was downright hair-raising to see the confrontations between crazed drivers and frantic groups of pedestrians trying to thread their way through it all.

It didn't take long for me to realize it was hopeless. They should have illuminated signs saying: "Abandon hope all ye potential parkers who enter there." Luckily, there was no line at the exits. People were far more determined to have the Ikea experience than I was.

As I left, I noticed that people were parking in the big Carrefour store across the four-lane highway that leads into Tours and then walking the equivalent of a couple of blocks — in the wind and rain, because a strong squall was passing over — to Ikea. Again there were hair-raising scenes of pedestrians trying to run between speeding cars on the highway, their line of sight obscured by their own and each other's umbrellas and hats and hoods.

I thought they must be literally giving things away at Ikea to generate so much enthusiasm and foolhardiness. Prices there are low, but not that low.

Birds over the vineyard, flying south. Smart birds.

Walt says there must be a lot of pent-up shopping energy ready to explode in this part of France. I suppose he's right. I can't even imagine what the inside of the store looked like. I'm sure it was wall-to-wall people shuffling around, pushing and shoving, stepping on each other's feet, and biting each other's heads off.

To add injury to insult, the Peugeot started making strange noises as I rode up and down the rows in the Ikea parking garage looking for a space....

More tomorrow.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Our mayor neighbor has been busy cleaning up our hamlet. She is responding to requests from her neighbors, I believe, and not just making decisions arbitrarily.

The vineyard in November

Our road, at least the paved part, ends just outside our back hedge. It turns into a gravel track out through the vineyard. You can drive on it with regular car if you are careful, but most of the "traffic" out there is little trucks and various kinds of tractors and farm equipment.

The problem is that when you get to the point where the pavement ends, you have the impression that if you turn left you might be able to continue your route. But no, the pavement ends there too, about 50 meters farther on, at the mayor's front gate.

The paved road ends here.

The other house on that little piece of road belongs to Mme J., a woman who is now about 86 years old and who is particularly sensitive to noise. Some of the other neighbors think she is entirely to bothered by the everyday noise of lawnmowers, chainsaws, and grape harvesters — they say she just likes to complain and be disagreeable.

The mayor told us she had been requesting a "dead end" sign on the road for years. Once a car or truck makes that left turn, the driver has no choice but to back out, and that's a noisy proposition. Now Mme J. has her sign.

That sign is fine, I think, but the other one that appeared the other day really seems to shout it's message. There used to be a big pile of compost right outside our back gate. It was where we and some of the neighbors would pile branches and dead leaves and weeds we'd pulled up.

"No dumping, under penalty of fine"

I even remember seeing the mayor dumping things out there once or twice, and once I saw her out there digging out some rich humus to use in her garden. Now the compost pile is gone and the little plot of land is scraped flat. When we first moved here, I once mentioned to a man who does gardening for two of our neighbors that I didn't like have a pile of yard waste right outside my back gate.

At the time, the gardener told me I'd have to talk to the people at the village hall if I wanted the waste pile removed. As it turns out, years later, I've learned that the gardener is a good friend of the mayor's and her husband's. He must have told them of my concerns. Now there's a sign to make sure that spot doesn't turn into a compost pile again.

Potée, suite et fin

A French potée is very similar to the famous poule au pot, which is a chicken simmered in broth with vegetables. It's a boiled dinner for which everything is cooked in the same pot. The version made with beef is called a pot au feu.

A related specialty is New England boiled dinner, made with corned beef. How good these boiled dinners are depends entirely on good ingredients and careful cooking to produce tender meat, vegetables that are not overcooked, and a rich broth.

Sprouts trimmed and potatoes peeled, ready to go into the pot

When you make a potée or other boiled dinner, you usually end up with meat and vegetables for more than just one meal (I always make enough to serve us for two or three days). Then you can make soup out of the broth by dicing up and adding in the leftover meat and vegetables.

Carrots, onions, and herbs are standard ingredients for any of these French recipe. Turnips and cabbage are usual additions, and a lot of people add in white beans. In France, where there are recipes for potée auvergnate, potée lorraine, potée limousine, and potée bretonne — just to name a few — the ingredients vary slightly from region to region.

Half-cooked sprouts ready for sautéeing

The main thing is to start the meat or poultry cooking in cold water, and then to keep it at a low simmer for an hour or more. Don't let it boil hard or the vegetables and meat will start to break down. In a potée, normally there is at least one piece of smoked meat in the pot for flavor.

A good substitute for porc demi-sel would be a brined or salt-cured hamhock. Or a slab of smoked or salt-cured bacon. You can use chicken, duck, or turkey sausages, whether they are smoked or not. Here in France we can buy smoked chickens, but they are sold fully cooked so you wouldn't want to leave one in the broth for too long — it would be overdone.

Here's the improvised « potée », ready for the table.

Our Brussels sprouts are certainly not traditional, but we both like them. I dipped out some of the meat & vegetable broth. I had put in 6 little carrots and 10 little onions, along with parsley stems, a couple of bay leaves, and some peppercorns and allspice berries in with the meat. Then I cooked the sprouts in a separate pot with a couple of ladles of broth.

Walt likes to cook Brussels sprouts partially in water or broth, let them cool just a little, and then cut each sprout in half. Then he sautées the halves in a big skillet with butter and oil, and he sprinkles some flour on them as they start to sizzle so that they get a little crust. That produces a nice contrast in textures.

Bon appétit !

A little bit of butter or olive oil stirred into some of the hot broth and spooned over all makes the vegetables really good. Pass the pepper.

Two of my main ideas about cooking are:

• You have to eat and most people have to cook. It's necessary and a fact of life. If you can make a pleasure out of that necessity, why not?
  
• There are foods we need to eat that we don't always like — this applies mostly to vegetables. So figure out how to prepare them in ways you find appetizing. I feel better both physically and mentally as a result.

Hé, on mange quoi à midi ?

On commence a avoir sérieusement faim ici à Saint-Aignan. Tout cet optimisme, tous ces espoirs pour un monde meilleur, ça m'a donné de l'appétit !

So what if we cooked a potée? That's a kind of cabbage soup with pork and sausages. It's a classic country dish in France for the colder days of winter. I've got Brussels sprouts, which were on special at Ed (the EuroDiscount supermarket) for 1€/kg (they were much more at Intermarché yesterday) and which are nice-looking. I've got carrots and potatoes and onions.

Brussels sprouts, brined pork, smoked sausages,
onions, carrots, and potatoes for a potée

I wish I had a leek or two and a few turnips or rutabagas, but I don't feel like going out today to get some after doing my shopping yesterday. I should have planned this better. Tant pis — we'll make do with what we've got.

The pork I bought is called porc demi-sel. "Half-salt pork" — that doesn't mean much. I've always wondered how to translate demi-sel. The dictionary says "slightly salted" but that doesn't mean much either because it's not a set expression, at least not in American English. If it said salé, I would call it salt-cured. Petit salé is a kind salt-cured pork in French, and it's often served with lentils.

Traité en salaison means it's been salt-cured or brined.

Plat de côte means something like "short ribs" or "side meat."

It dawned on me this morning that the expression we would probably use for demi-sel is "brined" — brining has been a very popular way of treating meats and poultry, especially the Thanksgiving turkey, in California (San Francisco, anyway) for a past few years. So what I have then is "brined pork."

You can cook brined pork without first de-salting it. You just start it in a big pot of cold water with onions, leeks, carrots, herbs, and pepper — but no added salt. It doesn't need it. Or you can soak the meat for an hour or so in a good quantity of cold water to get some of the salt out of it before you cook it if you prefer.

I probably should have bought real saucisses de Montbéliard,
but these are what I ended up with in my shopping cart.

You can do the same thing with corned beef, which is also brined. "Corned" means salted or brined. The word "corn" in this case refers to "grains" of coarse salt, evidently.

Brining gives pork (porc demi-sel), beef (corned beef), fish (salt cod), or poultry (brined turkey) a different taste and texture from the fresh versions, and it's taste and texture that many people enjoy. It takes some of the gaminess out of turkey, for example.

Historically, meat was packed in salt to preserve it, because there wasn't any refrigeration except the natural kind when the weather was cold. Now we have refrigeration and don't need to salt or brine meats or fish, but as I said we just enjoy the flavor.

When I lived in Paris in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a charcuterie on the rue Montorgueil near Les Halles where I liked to shop. I lived in the neighborhood. The charcutière was a red-headed woman who liked to explain to her customers how to cook and serve the cuts of pork and sausages she sold. She would give me cooking times and methods, advice on vegetables to serve with the meat, and general encouragement about doing my own cooking. I learned a lot from her.

@Dan M., our low temperature this morning was 6ºC, or about 43ºF. They're predicting rain today, then a break, and then rain all day tomorrow. Cold rain means perfect weather conditions for a potée.

This makes me happy

Barack Obama won in North Carolina. Add 15 electoral votes to his total. Here's a link to a Washington Post article.

Polls in France show that something like 85 to 90 percent of the French people say they are happy that Obama was elected. French politicians are jealous.

I think I heard this from Jack Lang in his Télématin interview yesterday morning: On the question of whether French President Nicolas Sarkozy had talked to President-Elect Obama, the answer was no. Sarkozy has several messages in to Obama's staff people, but no phone call has been scheduled so far.

Sarkozy made a big deal out of his admiration and respect for George W. Bush and American free-market ideas when he was running for president here. That was before the Bush administration decided to "go socialist" by nationalizing the mortgage lending corporations and the big banks.

Before he was president, Sarkozy also said of the children of recent immigrants from Africa, born in France, that they were racaille, which the Collins-Robert dictionary translates as "rabble, riffraff." At the time, the English-language press translated it as "scum." Sarkozy also said what was needed in the immigrant neighborhoods north and east of Paris was a good wash-down with fire hoses.

Maybe Sarkozy will now tone down some of his comments to fit in with a new spirit of politics brought on by the change of regime in Washington.

Only one nasty comment

That's not bad, out of dozens of comments over the last couple of days, I guess. I don't know who that "Anonymous" was (and I use the past tense on purpose, because the person might as well comment elsewhere), but I enjoyed CHM's comment back about the sanctity of divorce.

I went to bed at 8:00 last night and didn't wake up until 7:30 this morning. I thought: "Was it all a dream?"

And then I turned on Télématin on France 2 television to watch the weather report and the morning news. Somebody was interviewing Jack Lang, who is a former mayor of Blois and was France's Minister of Culture in socialist president François Mitterrand governments in the 1980's and early 1990's. He is also an ex-chairman of the French parliament's foreign relations committee.

Lang, a lion of the French Socialist party, was talking about the election of Barack Obama as the next U.S. President. "Even a lot of died-in-the-wool conservatives are applauding Obama's election," Lang said. "But Obama is a progressive who has said he plans to lower taxes on the middle classes and raise taxes on the rich to finance programs and projects for the good of the country — public works, education, other government services. Maybe these conservatives will now begin to adopt such progressive ideas."

"We are dreaming with our eyes open," Lang said. I'm translating his French literally, but you can see what the meaning is. He describes the feelings of optimism and hope that he experienced on learning of Obama's election to what many in France felt when François Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981. And it's true, there was an explosion of joy back then, especially among young people. A large crowd gathered on the Place de la Bastille in Paris the night of the election to celebrate. It was comparable to the joy you could feel in the crowd at Grant Park in Chicago the other night. France was "turning a page of its history," Lang said, just as the U.S. is turning a page now.

Lang used the expression "moral elegance" to describe his assessment of Barack Obama, compared to George Bush's brutality. "George Bush has blood on his hands," Lang continued. "I am convinced that Obama is and will be a man of peace and will propose a kind of New Deal for countries where violence has been so terrible for the past few years."

Walt said somebody asked, in a comment on his blog, whether he and other expats will be returning home to celebrate now that we are so happy about Obama's election. Why do some Americans have to see the choice to go live in another country as a rejection of America? Those people seem to feel judged by people who want to live differently.

The fact is, I do feel, or part of me does, that it would be good to go spend some time in the U.S. now, to be part of it all. And that is true despite the fact that I've felt at home in France since the 1970s. And I know that if I lived in the U.S. I would miss France terribly. It's not always easy to have a foot (or your heart) in each of two cultures and countries.

Okay, I'm in trouble

I can't stop blogging. I'm a zombie so I hope I'm making some sense. Here's what the wave of emotion that washed over me this morning has me thinking.

It all started very nearly 45 years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963. For three-quarters of my existence — I'll soon be 60 years old — on a public, political, cultural level, it has been one long series of horrible, traumatic events after another. I remember:

• John F. Kennedy assassinated
• Vietnam war escalates
• Malcolm X assassinated
• Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated
• Robert Kennedy assassinated
• Riots at Democratic Party convention in Chicago
  
• Richard Nixon elected president
• Vietnam war spins out of control
• George Wallace shot down in attempted assassination
  
• Nixon re-elected in a landslide
• Jesse Helms elected to the U.S. Senate
• Watergate
• Destroying villages in Vietnam "to save them"
• Napalm and Agent Orange
• The first petroleum shock
• Nixon resigns
• Two assassination attempts against Gerald Ford
• Inflation
• The Iran hostage crisis
• The second petroleum crisis
• Ronald Reagan elected president
• Reagan seriously wounded in assassination attempt
• Reagan hints that Martin Luther King was probably "a communist"
• Reagan vetoes sanctions against the apartheid government in South Africa (fortunately the Senate overrides the veto)
• Reagan's "voodoo economics" leads to crushing federal deficits
• Famine in Africa
  
• The space shuttle explodes on take-off
• Grenada and Iran-Contra
• The first Gulf War
• Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
• Clinton universal health care plan goes down in flames
• Newt Gingrich
• The politics of personal destruction
  
• Monica Lewinsky
• Impeachment
• Supreme Court intervention makes George W. Bush president despite loss of the popular vote
• Dick Cheney becomes vice-president
• September 11, 2001
• Bush invades Iraq on false pretexts
• Bush deficits make Reagan's seem like peanuts
• The space shuttle explodes on landing approach
• Bush re-elected to second term against all odds
• Thousands killed and maimed in Iraq, but no ceremonies or acknowledgment of that reality in the U.S.
  
• The Surge
• The stock market crash and the bailout of the wasteful rich people responsible for it
  

Finally, in 2008, 45 years after it all started, there is a ray of sunlight. Barack Obama is actually elected president of the United States. A new era dawns. Can it be?

I saw this in the New York Times: Overheard in long line at a polling place in North Carolina. One person asks another: "How long have you been waiting?" The answer: "200 years."

I guess 45 years isn't so bad after all.

Note to self

Self: the next time the brilliant idea of pulling an all-nighter takes possession of you, walk immediately to the medicine cabinet, take a couple of Tylenol PM tablets, and then go lie down to think it over.

While lying there, dream about how, when you were in college 40 years ago, it would take your mind and soul a week to recover from just one sleepless night spent cramming for an exam.

I'll get back to the blog in a few days, when the fog lifts and it has all had time to sink in.

Over...

Maybe our national nightmare has finally ended. A new day has dawned.

Obama is the man.

Did you believe this was possible? I don't think I dared to believe it myself.

Here I was ready to stick my fingers in my ears and hum really loudly as the bad news about the election came in over CNN.

Eliz. Dole loses in N.C.

It looks like Elizabeth Dole has lost in her effort to be re-elected to a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina. Whew! She's the one who ran an ad accusing her opponent of being an atheist. If the people of North Carolina are abandoning Dole, they are probably also abandoning McCain and the Republicans in general. It's looking good for Barack Obama.

If you wonder what this news from the U.S. has to do with life in Saint-Aignan.... well, there are at least two Americans living here. And this morning, when Sylvie, la boulangère, delivered the bread, asked me whether I would be following the election results tonight. I said yes, of course. And she told me that she would vote for Obama if she were American.

The suspense is killing me

I can't post today. There are too many things on my mind — especially the elections of course. It's going to be a long day.

I've been up cooking since 7:00. I made a variation on sauce bolognaise using chunks of stew beef (bœuf à bourguignon) rather than ground beef, along with onions, carrots, herbs, mushrooms, and a lot of tomatoes. It went into the oven at 8:30 a.m. It's a recipe from a young chef in Montréal named Louis-François Marcotte that I got off the web. I'm ready for lunch but it's way too early.

More tomorrow.

T.I.L.A.W.I.F (2)

The glassed-in sun porch and gradually bringing in all the potted plants as the weather turns colder.

Especially nice on a sunny morning

The geraniums and a lot of plantes grasses — succulents — are the main ones that need protection from the cold.

And then this from just five minutes ago:

A November 3 rainbow

Things I like about winter in France

Shutters and closing them. And that includes the big shutters over the French doors between the terrace (or deck — why does the word "terrace" sound too fancy to me?) and the living room.

Does anybody in America have shutters like these? We don't close them in the summer, because it stays light until bedtime anyway. But in winter, it gets dark early and the shutters give you privacy as well as a little extra insulation from the cold and wind.

With shutters like these, you don't need heavy drapes over the windows. Or blinds. In San Francisco, that's what we had: either ugly drapes, or mini-blinds, or vertical blinds. I think shutters make a lot more sense.

When you go away and leave the house empty for a few days, the shutters are also a security feature. They make it that much harder for burglers to get in.

The only reason I can think of to explain the shutters on all the windows in France is the country's history of warfare — which goes back to pre-historic times, actually. In America, we don't have that.

Stay in and cook

Weather forecasts call for rain all weekend. So we are hunkering down. No need to go anywhere. I may be setting a record here for the most days I've ever stayed at home without going out in the car at all. I was able to have a nice walk with Callie yesterday afternoon. A steady, almost heavy rain is falling this morning.

Toussaint 2004 — cleaning up ghe garden at La Renaudière

I'm glad we got so much garden clean-up work done. Even though we didn't finish everything, we are in good shape. And the good news is that it's supposed to be sunny on Monday. I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that it also started raining out there yesterday or the day before. A weather expert expleained that the rains always start in Northern California in the "World Series/Halloween" time-frame. Here in France rains start at Toussaint. Always have, as far back as I can remember (and that's 40 years).

In 1989, Walt and I took a late-October driving tour around the south of France, starting in Grenoble and passing through Nîmes, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Cognac, Poitiers, and... Saint-Aignan. The weather was gorgeous — warm and sunny nearly the whole time — until we got to the Loire Valley. It must have been very early November and it turned gray and rainy. We stopped in Chartres before arriving in Paris, but it was disappointing because there was no sunlight streaming through the amazing stained-glass windows.

Cemetery flowers that won't fade

I just looked back at 2003-2007 pictures and blog postings from around November 1. I realized that this time of year in Saint-Aignan seems almost foreign to me because the last time I was here in early November was in 2005. And that year good friends from California were visiting, so I was too busy to notice the change of seasons.

In 2006 and 2007 I was in the United States on November 1. Last year I was in Alabama, Georgia, and then North Carolina. I think the weather was beautiful. In 2006, Walt and I were in Alabama, Kentucky, and Illinois in early November. It was cold and rainy there too, some days, but we were on the road, exploring new areas, eating new food, and not worried about the damp chill.

So today I'm going to make roasted chicken with a peanut sauce. Thanks to Loulou for the idea and recipe. I'm going to use peanut butter from a jar that I got at the Asian supermarket called Paris Store in Blois. Along with soy sauce, rice vinegar, garlic, ginger, and hot red peppers. The chicken and sauce should be good with Asian noodles.

Toussaint 2005 — 'mums in the cemetery at Mareuil-sur-Cher

Today is La Toussaint, or All Saints' Day. Tomorrow is The Day of the Dead. This is the time of year when people visit the cemeteries and clean up the graves and tombs of loved ones who have passed on. I saw in the paper that there are guided tours of the cemetery in Blois this weekend, highlighting the most beautiful tombs and mausoleums.

Since we don't have any tombs to admire or refurbish, we'll just stay in and cook.

Because it's a holiday, the boulangère won't be making her usual Saturday bread deliveries. That's OK. A lot of the bakeries will be open this morning and tomorrow morning. Same with the supermarkets. Not that we need anything, except some sunshine.

An early blast of cold air

I've been blogging for three years now. Time flies — my first post was on 20 October 2005 — and for a while now I have been posting daily. As I've said before, my two motivations in blogging have been to find an outlet for the pictures I love to take, and to help fellow Americans and others see what life (or "a life") in the French countryside is all about. There is much beauty to admire here, and much good food to be cooked and eaten.

The view from the kitchen window yesterday morning —
a dusting of snow on the neighbors' rooftop

The pictures in this topic are pretty much my view of the world these days. All were taken out of my front windows. We are having a pretty fall, but not as pretty as the autumn of 2003 (here's a link to some 2003 pictures). And we are having cold weather early. As you know, it snowed yesterday — in October. Last winter we didn't have any snow at all all winter long. However, today's weather in no way indicates how cold or mild our winter is going to be. Only time will tell that.

The maple trees off our front terrace, and our woodpile

When I say this is my view of the world, I mean it. I haven't been out of La Renaudière since last Saturday. In other words, I haven't started the car in a week. I've walked the dog once a day out in the vineyard — with the exception of yesterday morning because it was snowing.

The snow didn't stick. The temperature never went all the way down to 0ºC. The low was 1.1, I think, and by afternoon it was 5 or 6. This morning's low was higher than yesterday's high. We had a hard rain shower early this morning, but no repeat of the cold blast of air we got yesterday.

View through a window pane

I appreciate all your comments yesterday. Remember, I didn't say I was going to stop blogging. I guess what I was saying was that I wanted to apologize for being boring. And explain why I was posting translations of local newspaper articles. Since I haven't been out of the house for a week now, I don't have much to report on when it comes to local life.

Walt just took the car out — we had actually put it in the garage when freezing temperatures and precipitation were predicted — to go shopping up at SuperU. We don't need much, but he has a couple of sale items he wants to check out so he went today. I decided to stay home. I'm going to make soup for lunch.

Another view from the kitchen window

I appreciate the comments from the "regulars" — you know who you are, and I know many of you personally, not just virtually. I also greatly appreciate the comments from people I don't know personally, including those who have never commented before.

I get statistics from an outfit called SiteMeter that I use to track visits to the blog. In three years the blog has been "hit" over 91,000 times. If you open the blog 2 or 8 or 20 times a day, each time is recorded as a visit, so "visits" or "hits" don't equate to a number of individual visitors or readers. Walt and I have set up Blogger to ignore all the many times a day we open our own or each other's blogs, so our visits don't get counted. That keeps the number down to a level that's a little more realistic than it would be otherwise.

We really need to have double-glazed windows
put in all around the house.

Right now, Living the Life in Saint-Aignan is opened about 140 times a day. The average length of time a visitor stays is about three minutes. I also can get a report showing me where visitors are located — in what city and country. There are some other statistics too, having to do with the operating systems visitors are running, the resolution of their monitors, and so on.

Blogger limits the amount of storage space on the server I can use for my blog photos. It's 1024 MB, and I've used about half of my allotted space now. That took about three years, so I figure I have another three years of blogging ahead of me.

They say a work of art is never finished, only abandoned. I'm not comparing my blog to a work of art, but abandonment really is the only way to end a blog. There is no natural conclusion, no happy or sad ending, no wrap-up.

Here's a movie of our excitement for the week:
big fat snowflakes falling at La Renaudière

By the way, our neighbors the mayor and her husband have been back nearly all week. I've seen him a couple of time but not her. I imagine her duties as mayor meant she had to hit the ground running on their return. He, J-M, said that he would be busy processing a few hundred photos from the trip and that we would be invited to some kind of get-together soon to see the photos and talk about the trip.

About the U.S. presidential election, I'll say this: I would really love to be able to vote in my native North Carolina this year. You understand. But it's been decades since I last lived there, so I'm not registered.

Laying eggs

Yesterday I opened up a blog I have read regularly for a while now only to learn that the author has decided to stop posting. It was called "L.A. en vie" and the writer, Sedulia, has an inviting writing style and an interesting point of view. She said she felt like she didn't have much to say any more. She's at least the third blogger I know of who has pulled the plug recently.

Callie stalking something

Sedulia, an American, moved from Paris to Los Angeles a year or more ago after spending many years in Europe. When she lived in Paris, she published the blog called Rue Rude — you might remember it. She said she would post there again on future trips to Paris.

Every once in a while, we all feel the way Sedulia does right now. It comes in waves. These days, I don't have too much to say either. Everything I write seems to me to describe a fairly humdrum existence. I'm not complaining or feeling sorry for myself — every day I'm busy with garden and yard work, cooking, house cleaning and organizing, dog walking, and reading blogs and newspaper articles on the Internet.

The vineyard yesterday afternoon

But I think I've described all that over and over again on this blog. I refuse to start writing about U.S. politics, even though that would be a natural thing for an American to do at this point in time.

You're probably a little bored with my topics, as am I these days. But I don't plan to stop posting. Soon something interesting will happen around here and I'll write about it.

Meanwhile, I hope these local newspaper articles will give you a little of the flavor of local life here in the Loir-et-Cher department of France. Here's one from yesterday's paper. As you'll see, it's not about elections, murders, financial crises, or any of the other big subjects of the day. Ce sont des petites scènes de la vie de tous les jours comme on la connaît en Val de Loire — little word paintings of everyday life in the Loire Valley.

Market seller doesn’t put all her eggs in one basket
With her farm products, Sandrine Ruby respects “the cycles of nature.” The items she sells, including goat cheeses and eggs, are guaranteed to be “garden-fresh.”

For eight years now, faithful customers have been returning to the Coty neighborhood market in Blois on Wednesdays to see the young farmer from the Ferme aux oiseaux — The Bird Farm — at Les Hermites in the Indre-et-Loire department. Nicole, a retiree, is one of them. “Here, the vendor is a nice friendly person and the quality is guaranteed, with products that are a good value for the price,” she says

“We have about a hundred goats in our pasture,” says Sandrine. “Our cheeses are made exclusively with their milk, and we age the cheeses naturally. I make cheeses in the shape of logs, disks, and the little round ones called crottins. Sometimes I add some color by rolling the cheeses in herbs or chopped walnuts. In season, I sell chicken, quail, duck, and turkey eggs, all of them “fresh from the garden,” Sandrine says with a chuckle. The amount of cheese she makes depends on the amount of milk her goats produce at different times of the year.

“In November, we don’t milk them because they are getting ready to kid. With eggs, it’s the same thing. We respect the natural cycles, and we don’t force-feed our animals to increase production. So today, for example, I don’t have any chicken eggs to sell because the hens didn’t lay any.”

From time to time, Sandrine also brings to market ostrich eggs that have been laid by friends’ birds.

“An ostrich egg is equal to 24 chicken eggs. And it contains less fat so it’s good if you have a cholesterol problem,” according to Sandrine, who also sells honey and oil produced by another friend. “That helps liven up my display,” she says.

I just opened the back door to see what's going on out there. It's snowing. More precisely, there's a mix of rain and snow falling. It's not sticking. The temperature is just a degree or two above freezing. Not even Callie wants to go outside in that.

Fruits and vegetables

Here at La Renaudière, the outdoor furniture and plants have been brought in for the winter. The heat is on. The temperature outside is at freezing. The sky is clear but there's a layer of fog over the river and there's a big cloud bank to our north. It's supposed to rain (or worse) this afternoon.

Meanwhile, I've been enjoying the Nouvelle République newspaper's articles about the Romorantin Food Festival. Here's another one.

Frédéric Junault is the champion

Frédéric Junault of Cheverny in Sologne, who now resides in Paris, is France’s first champion in the art of fruit and vegetable sculpture.

The Romo Food Festival sponsored the competition over the weekend. Five sculptors spent the day on Saturday creating artworks around compulsory themes: a pheasant, a basket of fruit, a cocktail and decorated glasses, a sculpted melon, and a bouquet of flowers.

Frédéric Junault is a professional. He sees fruits and vegetables as a passion, a calling. “All too often fruits and vegetables are trivialized, even though they represent well-being and healthy eating. With today’s equipment and products, it’s no more difficult to make soup than it is to heat up a frozen pizza. Maybe I’m a modern-day Don Quixote, but I preach the cause of things that are difficult to accomplish.” The artist appreciates the initiative of the Romo Food Festival and the support of various national federations: “For fruits and vegetables... bingo!”

For Junault — who works as an event planner and teaches classes — sculpting fulfills a “need to decorate.” A trip to Thailand, which is a mecca for sculptors, was all it took: “In Thailand, there is a reverence for fruits and vegetables, a higher meaning, an entire symbolism that is a part of many cultures. It was a revelation that led me into teaching.” Gérard Rigault won the attendees' prize, “La Palombière.”

I don't know what “La Palombière” is — is it the name of the prize he won? A palombe is a woodpigeon or ringdove. Or could it be the sculpture that Mr. Rigault created? I guess the writer (Brigitte Vaugeois) felt she needed to mention the runner-up, even if the mention is a complete non sequitur.

Romorantin's Journées gastronomiques

Our local newspaper is called La Nouvelle République. It's published in Tours, and it has different editions for different départements in our region.

The article below is about a food festival last weekend over in Romorantin, which everybody here calls "Romo" and which is about 20 miles northeast of Saint-Aignan. Romo is the largest town (pop. 20,000) in the region called La Sologne, which is a flat, sandy area of pine forests and small lakes. La Sologne is known for game animals and hunting, along with asparagus, strawberries, and some of the most famous châteaux of the Loire Valley — Chambord, Cheverny, and others.

Loir-et-Cher — Local happenings
A Blend of Sologne and Portuguese Flavors in Romo
After the success of the 2007 event featuring the food of Martinique, just as many attend the Portuguese festival.

High attendance marked Romorantin’s 31st Food Festival. The local Portuguese community got involved to organize the celebration, and were successful.

Re-energized by the success of the Martinique celebration last year, the Food Festival was faced with the challenge of matching 2007's attendance figures. The organizers placed their bets on Portugal, calling on local associations and the Portuguese community, a long-time presence in the Sologne and the Cher Valley.

Portuguese dance troupes entertain crowds at Romo's food fest.
Thanks to La Nouvelle République for the photo.

“People really turned out. We are very pleased,” said Antonio Azevedo of the “Friends of Portugal” association yesterday.

“We hadn’t attended in a long time. This year was better than ever: lively, festive, fun,” said Claude and Alain Benoît from Palluau-sur-Indre. They were munching on chorizo and shrimp croquettes, the ubiquitous salt cod, and “natas” for dessert.

“We are proud for Portugal to be so honored,” said Marie and Isabelle de Jesus.

They are sisters, Romorantin natives of Portuguese background. “The community turned out in mass. There was a festive atmosphere in the streets thanks to dance troupes. The bigtop where Portuguese products were on sale was not as much fun as last year’s, though. But that’s how Portuguese people are. We aren’t like people from the islands.”

“The cultures are different. You can’t compare them,” said Laetitia and Catherine, attending with 2-year-old Mathys and 6-year-old Manon. “At any rate, this gave us a chance to experience something different — to feel like we were somewhere other than in the Sologne for a little while,” said Amandine Berry and Julien Duwicquet, forks in hand.

Construction hands
For the town of Romorantin, this 31st Food Festival was an occasion for reflecting on recent history, especially immigration trends from the 1950s to the 1970s, which brought in Portuguese farm, construction, and factory workers. The festival program featured a retrospective on the years when local and immigrant populations began to mix. There were concerts, lectures, slideshows, and story-telling sessions.

Next year, the Romorantin Food Festival will focus on Spain. It will be organized with the help of Romo’s new Spanish sister city, Aranda-de-Duero.

I found this web site for a Portuguese bakery in Los Angeles that describes the Protuguese "natas" pastry. It seems to be a little custard tart.

I enjoyed this sidebar, printed on the same page:

Bourges resident wins “best cook” prize
Victor Ostronzec carried the day in Romorantin.

Bourges resident Victor Ostronzec, 25, won the Robert-Guérin competition, which honors the best cook at the Romo Food Festival.

Thanks to La Nouvelle République for the photo.

Ostonzec works at the Saint-Ambroix abbey in Bourges. This was his first competition. “It’s a lot of work,” he said. “Intensive training over a month or more, with this help of the whole abbey team. My chef was always there to coach me.” Ostronzec won the competition with his saddle of wild hare. “I stuffed it with foie gras and garnished it with potatoes (or apples), carrots, and wild mushrooms. I served it with a small cabbage stuffed with truffles and a sauce made with the blood of the hare. Everything was carefully timed. An hour and a half to prepare a dish like this is really tight!”

I'm not sure whether the foie gras stuffing included potatoes or apples. The French just says « pommes » without specifying. I translated it as potatoes. The wild mushrooms the cook mentions are called trompettes-de-la-mort — "trumpets of death"— in French. I've never tried them. Would you? Maybe you know them by their English name, which is apparently "horn of plenty."

It seems like Walt and I went to the wrong festival. Romo's would have been more fun than Saint-Aignan's.

Getting ready

Yesterday was the last nice day we're going to have for a while, according to weather forecasters. It was sunny and bright, and I got out and raked up some leaves in the afternoon. Earlier we spent most of the day in the kitchen, cooking lunch and getting some food items like turkey legs processed for freezing — in other words, we cut them up and packaged them in meal-size servings.

A fog bank hugged the river valley yesterday morning.

It was brighter than usual when I took the dog out for a walk yesterday morning. That's because of our time change. I actually went out an hour later than I'd been going recently because we fell back an hour. Our time difference with the U.S. East Coast is only five hours right now, not six, and eight with California instead of nine.

Spiders have been busy.

I noticed spider webs absolutely everywhere out in the vineyard yesterday morning. There was morning dew and the sun was sparkling off dewdrops, making the webs very visible. I assume the spiders are trying to catch as many bugs as possible right now, fattening themselves up for the winter. Laying in supplies, maybe.

Sunday sunset

This Monday morning a hard steady rain is falling. It's not very cold, but I needed to turn on the heat to take the chill off the house. By mid-week, temperatures are supposed to be down to or even below freezing. There could even be snow, especially in the mountains south and east of us, but maybe even as far west as Saint-Aignan.

October's last gasp

The calendar doesn't indicate it, but according to nature November has arrived. The mayor and her husband got back yesterday afternoon from their trip to California and the Far West, where the weather has been gorgeous. I bet they are not happy campers this morning.

Too early

That could be a title referring to the fact that we have now gone back on heure d'hiver — standard or winter time, they call it — here in France. I keep telling myself that it won't be eight o'clock until nine o'clock this morning. It's very confusing. Callie is going to wonder why her walk is so late.

But "too early" actually has to do with the street fair in Saint-Aignan yesterday. That's when we got there. I was up very early and we were out the door by about 9:30, after Walt took the dog out. When we got to Saint-Aignan we found a place to park and took a walk to survey the scene.

A view of Saint-Aignan's old towers from near the town cemetery

In fact, there weren't many people out yet and I think some of the vendors hadn't yet set up their stalls for the day. The morning weather was chilly but the sun was already peeking through thin clouds. The St-Simon festival is an all-day affair and I think people were waiting until later than we had to join the fun.

A lot of the vendors were selling clothes and shoes. I'm sure some of them had good-quality, fashionable pumps, jackets, shirts, and dresses on offer. But the overall impression I get when I see the merchandise for sale at these kinds of markets is that it looks very old-fashioned. And it can be pricey at these special events — one vendor was selling bedroom slippers for €30 a pair. Similar slippers go for €5 a pair at SuperU or Intermarché.

Carnival rides were being set up on the main town square.
That's the château de Saint-Aignan looming in the background.

Pricey is the word for a lot of the food on sale too. One vendor had cheeses like big wheels of Gruyère or Cantal, but he was asking €30 a kilogram for it. I bought AOC Comté, a similar if not better cheese, at Intermarché on Friday for €8.50/kg.

Sometimes you think these vendors, who most likely travel a circuit from town to town over the course of the year to sell what they sell, are playing on older people's confusion about prices in euros as opposed to the old prices in French francs. In other words, something that would have cost, say, 7 francs a few years ago is now on sale for 7 euros, like the little butter cakes from Brittany at one stall. The problem is that the euro is worth 6.5 francs, so that's quite a markup. Seven francs is just a little more than one euro.

Later in the day, the weather was nice enough for hot-air
balloons to be drifting over the autumn countryside.

There were also stands selling, or getting ready to start selling, hot food to eat. There were big long rolls of boudin noir (blood sausage) sitting in stainless steel pans over a warming fire (€11/kg). At another stand there was a big pan of andouillettes (chitterling sausages) steaming away in a sea of white beans with a light tomato sauce. It was pork'n'beans on steroids. It was too early in the morning for those strong odors.

Nobody was selling bernache yet. The stands were set up, the signs were posted (€1 a glass), and the tables were set out. There were even a few bottles of bernache on the tables. Well, not bottles as you might think of them — they were plastic Evian and Vittle mineral-water bottles that had been filled with the yellowish, cloudy bernache, which is the year's first wine and is still fermenting when you drink it. They say it can wreak havoc with your digestive system, but people think it's fun to drink some at this time of year.

It's the time of year when people burn leaves and other yard waste.
There was a big fire off on the horizon, across the river from us.

You can read more about bernache and a lot of other interesting topics on Susan and Simon's blog, Days on the Claise.

It was only 10:15 or so, so too early for bernache, blood sausage, or andouillettes and beans — at least for us. We did a fairly brisk walk-through, decided it wasn't really for us, and headed for the food market. We needed mushrooms, and the woman who grows them and sells them in Saint-Aignan on Saturday mornings was there. We bought 500 grams of white button mushrooms for today's blanquette de veau. Then we walked back to the car and drove home.

Pink October sunrise

Yesterday morning I very nearly decided not to take my camera with me on the morning walk with Callie. It was cold and fairly dark outside at 8:00 a.m. I was going to put on a hat and gloves for the first time this season. Taking pictures with gloves on is not really practical.

Looking toward the village at 8:15 a.m.
24 October 2008

I even rifled my closet in search of my long johns and found them. I put them on under my jeans. The temperature outside was 1.8ºC, which is something like 35ºF. Brrrr. And as I said, it was dark when the dog and I left the house. At the last second, I stuck my camera and my extra battery in my pocket.

Callie seemed to be enoying the show too.
If you can't see her, click the picture to enlarge it.

As we started to walk out into the vineyard, I noticed that the light was very unusual. I turned around and looked behind me, to the east. A bank of clouds was coming in from the northwest. Rain was predicted. But for the moment the wispy clouds were reflecting light from the sun, which hadn't yet come up over the horizon.

Follow the yellow-brick road (?).

The pink light combined with the yellow of the fading grape vine leaves to make a strange orange color at ground level. As the minutes passed, the clouds became less pink and started appearing much whiter.

That's our tree and house in the middle of the picture.

In the photo below, looking west instead of east toward the sunrise, you can see how the landscape already looks really wintry.

Frost on the grass

We were almost back home when I took this last photo. The colors had completely changed.

Changing light

Today is a special market day in Saint-Aignan. It's the weekend of the annual Fête de la Saint-Simon, with a street fair and flea market along with the weekly food market. I think the weather is supposed to cooperate, and we plan to go into town this morning to take some pictures.