First frost

Frost on October 15, 2009. It seems early this year. A French friend said a few weeks ago, when the weather was still very warm, almost hot, that winter would arrive all of a sudden. He was right. It stayed chilly all day yesterday, and we had a fire in the wood-burner again yesterday afternoon and evening.

Our new bread lady — la nouvelle porteuse de pain — who took over the route a few months ago, had this to say about our cold snap yesterday when she came by: « Ça ne durera pas ! » — "It won't last!" I hope she's right.

Yesterday's sunrise —
I can't tell if it looks as cold as it actually was.

We had a busy morning yesterday. While the weather was still too cold to go outside and work in, I made Sauce Meurette, a red wine sauce that's served with poached eggs, for lunch. It was something I could prepare in advance and then reheat when it came time to eat at noon. Then I made an apple cake, because we have so many apples and we didn't have any kind dessert in the house.

While the cake was baking, I went out and pulled up the last 15 tomato plants. I ended up with another bucketful of green tomatoes, plus a few ripe or almost-ripe one. Tomorrow, for lunch, it'll be fried green tomatoes. I don't think I've ever made those before.

Frost on the leaves of a little oak tree...

Meanwhile, Walt went out and worked on the hedge some more. I know everybody must wonder why the hedge trimming is such a big deal. Well, for one thing, the hedge is at least 100 yards long. That's a lot of hedge. And it's wide, so you have to cut half the top surface from one side, and then the other half from the other side. And it's tall — 10 or even 12 feet in some places, and more than 7 feet high all around the yard.

Such a hedge is great for privacy, and it looks great — when it's trimmed. Letting it just grow is not an option. Sometimes, I admit, it seems like just ripping it out and replacing it with a wall or fence would be the best solution. But it would have to be a very high wall or privacy fence to serve the same purpose.

...and frost on the leaves of blackberry vines

Trimming the hedge, then, means climbing up on a high ladder, working around all the obstacles in the way — trees and bushes, the wood shed, the garden shed, the barbecue grill, and more. And then there's the ditch. For about half the length of the hedge, on the outside of the yard, there's a deep drainage ditch.

That means you have to bridge the ditch with boards (old window shutters in our case), set the ladder up on them, and then cut what you can reach. Then you have to move the ladder, move the heavy window shutters a little farther down the ditch, set the ladder back up on them, and climb back up and start again. It's tiring and time-consuming.

Walt up on the ladder, trimming the last remaining section of hedge

But guess what! It's done for another year! And all the clippings that need to be raked up have been raked up. It looks neat. This is one of our biggest garden challenges. Why don't we hire a professional to do it? Budget reasons, of course, in large part. We don't have a lot of money to throw around.

This is what it's like to have retired early and to be living through a time when the value of the U.S. dollar is so low against the euro. Besides, we don't work for a living otherwise. Doing jobs like this one, along with the cooking, home improvements, and gardening that we do, makes us feel productive and gives us a sense of accomplishment. If you just sit here day after day, you start to feel worthless — your self-esteem goes down. You get bored.

After Walt finished the hedge work and we ate lunch, he made another Tarte Tatin (an upside-down apple pie). We're taking it today as our contribution to lunch with friends, at their house down in Le Grand-Pressigny.

I've been thinking about how much longer we will continue to live this "lifestyle," and what the next phase of our lives will be like. This was our seventh summer in the country outside Saint-Aignan. All that is a subject for another day. Along with the recipes for the apple cake and the Meurette red-wine sauce.

Ripping out tomato plants

The temperature at our house this morning is +1.3ºC — I put in the plus sign to make sure what I'm saying is clear. According to the weather report on Télématin, the low in Nevers this a.m. was -5ºC. And Nevers is not much more than 100 miles east of Saint-Aignan.

Here are the equivalents: +1.3ºC is 34.3ºF. That's in Saint-Aignan, at our house, and decimal point matters when it's this cold. In Nevers, that -5ºC is equivalent to 23ºF! At least it's bright and sunny during the daytime right now. Thanks to Scandinavia for sending us a packet of frigid air.

This is where 20 tomato plants used to stand.

Yesterday, while Walt was working on the hedge some more — it's very close to being done for another year — I pulled out a lot of tomato plants. Remember, we had about 35 of them. I think there may be 15 more out there, waiting for me to dispose of them this morning. I also brought a dozen or so potted plants into the house to protect them from the cold.

It always feels good to clean out the garden plots in the autumn. Now it really is autumn — witness the cold snap. And we are lucky this autum to have dry weather during the time when we have all this dirty work to do. Soon we'll have that big bonfire to get rid of all the yard trimmings and dried up garden plants.

This tomato plant has now spent its last night in the garden.

I'm not just ripping the tomato plants out of the ground by brute force, you know. First I have to cut or undo all the string and plastic-covered wire ties that held the plants to their stakes. I don't want all that stuff on the ground when next I run the roto-tiller out there. Then, or before, I have to gather all the little — and some not so little — green, yellow, pink, purple, and even red tomatoes left out there. The photos will show you what I'm talking about when I describe the end of the 2009 crop.

A multi-colored end for the tomato crop

We spent time a day or two ago picking up apples again, but there are still plenty of them on the ground and on the trees. Ninety percent of them go into the compost pile. That said, we've also eaten no fewer than three Tartes Tatin and two apple cakes over the past couple of weeks.

That famous pile of surplus apples

And whenever I go out to walk the dog, I grab an apple off a different tree from last time to see what it tastes like and what the texture is — crunchy, sour, sweet, mushy, crisp, mealy, bland, sharp, and so on. The apples off one of our neighbor's trees definitely have a vanilla flavor. I'm still getting to know all of them. There are probably a dozen varieties growing on trees all around the hamlet, and not very many get picked.

Looking over the back gate in fall

Did I mention another tree that has thousands of big, hard quinces on it? Should I make quince jelly again? Or apple jelly, or apple sauce? These are the big existential questions of the day.

I'm putting on my long johns under my blue jeans before I take Callie out for the morning walk in about 15 minutes. The first glimmers of light are showing through the curtains right now. And hey, we had a wood fire in the stove yesterday afternoon. Walt built a top-down fire, and it worked great. I'm sure he'll be telling about it at some point.

Tuesday's sunset at Saint-Aignan

Lunch today? Oeufs en meurette, which is a concoction of poached or baked eggs in a red wine sauce with onions, smoked pork lardons, and some herbs and vinegar. It's Burgundian. More about that later.

P.S. 9:00 a.m., just back from the walk. A man hired by the village is out back cleaning up around the communal pond, cutting down tall weeds, brambles, and even small trees. I greeted him with a remark about the cold weather. « Moins deux ce matin, » he said. « C'est un temps de saison. » — "Minus two [that's 28ºF]. It's normal for the season." It's true that there was a lot of frost out in the vineyard, and that our thermometer is close to the house in a protected spot.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

No, it's a moth. A couple of days ago, Susan of Days on the Claise posted a couple of pictures of the Hummingbird Hawk Moth, a moth that behaves and even looks a lot like an American hummingbird, but is smaller. We see them here in Saint-Aignan when the weather is hot in July, August, and September.

These are moths that are active in the daytime, feeding on summer flowers. They seem to like bright sunshine, and they certainly like the geraniums we have in planter boxes on our front terrace. Hummingbird Hawk Moths are native to the Old World, but similar moths live in the Americas.

This looks a lot like a hummingbird, don't you think?

But it's not one — it's a diurnal moth.

Like many people, when I first saw a hummingbird moth in summer 2004, I believed it was a tiny hummingbird. We had hummingbirds in abundance in California, and used to watch and photograph them whenever we could. Our good friend Cheryl had (maybe still has) hummingbird feeders outside her big living room window, and there was always a bird or two hovering there, feeding.

Here's a video that gives you at least some idea of what
it's like to see a hummingbird moth in summertime.

Five years ago, when I noticed my first hummingbird moth, called a moro sphinx or sphinx colibri in French — colibri is the French word for hummingbird — I did what seemed natural back then. I went and asked our neighbors if there were hummingbirds in the Loire Valley. They had heard of hummingbirds they said, but had never seen one and didn't think they lived here. I was seeing something else.

July 4, 2004 — time flies as fast as a hummingbird moth,
and in a blur it's gone...

Then I did what I would do today without a second thought: I looked up hummingbirds on the Internet, probably on Wikipedia. I learned that hummingbirds are American and aren't present elsewhere. That was news to me, and maybe it is to you. There are no hummingbirds in Europe or Africa, for example. But there are Hummingbird Hawk Moths from Spain to Japan. They are migratory too, spending winters in the south where it's warmer.

Thanks to Susan for reminding me of these photos
and the video I took back then.

The way these moths dart around, it's hard to get a good look at them. Mostly you see their movement — their wings are a blur — and you see them hovering in front of a flower of some kind. They have a long proboscis that they use to sip nectar out of tubular flowers. There are a lot of good pictures of them on Wikipedia under their scientific name, Macroglossum stellatarum.

I took the pictures in this post on July 4, 2004. That was more than a year before I started this blog, and as far as I can tell by searching through my 1,250 blog posts, I've never put them on the blog before. We have gotten used to seeing hummingbird moths darting around our geraniums and petunias on hot summer days in Saint-Aignan.

Tajine of sweet potatoes and veal

At Paris-Store up in Blois the other day we bought a couple of big sweet potatoes. We can get sweet potatoes at the supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan fairly often, but the ones a Paris-Store are a lot less expensive — 1.50 € a kilo, compared to 2.79 € or more at the local supermarkets.

The question then was what to do with them. Just bake them and have them with melted butter? Puree them and have them as a side dish? Make a pie?

Onions are a basic ingredient in tajines.

As usual, the Internet provided the answer. The idea of making a sweet potato tajine [tah-ZHEEN] came to me, and I found a couple of recipes pretty fast. The first one was for a tajine of sweet potatoes and veal, and I had a package of cut up veal shoulder in the freezer, waiting for an opportunity.

It's nice to be able to get good sweet potatoes.
These were white, not yellow, inside.

Tajines are easy to make. The main thing you need is the North African spices — some combination of turmeric, cinnamon, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and others. Curry powder would serve the purpose, with a little extra cinnamon and ginger added.

Veal shoulder — but boneless chicken or turkey
thigh meat would be good too.

A tajine is meat and vegetables, or just vegetables, simmered in water and broth with all those spices until all the flavors mingle and the ingredients are well cooked and succulent. It's a Moroccan-style stew, often cooked in an earthenware dish. Usually there are raisins, almonds, or dried apricots in the sauce for added richness.

Brown the meat, onions, and garlic with
the spices, and then add water.

I used veal in the tajine I made yesterday, but it would be really good with chicken thighs, for example, or some other pieces of chicken or turkey. The advantage of veal is that it is boneless and cooks up very tender. Turkey or chicken breast might be dry. But boneless thighs would be really good.

Tajine of sweet potatoes and veal with Moroccan spices

Here's the recipe:

Tajine of sweet potatoes and veal

2 lbs. veal, cut into 1" pieces
2 large sweet potatoes
2 large onions, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ cup raisins
6 dried apricots, cut into dice
2 Tbsp. fresh chopped coriander or basil
3 Tbsp. olive oil
2 bay leaves
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. turmeric
1 tsp. sweet paprika
pinches of cumin, cayenne pepper, and cinnamon
1 tsp. salt
½ tsp. black pepper

Peel and slice the onions and chop the garlic. Saute them along with the meat, the garlic, and all the spices spices in 2 Tbsp. olive oil in a big pot. Brown the meat and onions well, stirring to keep them from sticking. Then pour in enough water the just cover the meat. Put a lid on the pot and let it cook on low heat for 90 minutes, or until the meat is tender.

Meanwhile, peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into big chunks.

When the meat is close to done, add the sweet potatoes, raisins, and dried apricots to the stew and turn up the heat just a little. Let that simmer, covered, for 30 or 40 minutes longer, adding water as necessary to keep it all moist but not soupy. When the sweet potatoes are done, it's ready.

We made some roasted millet, which is cooked like rice, to go with our tajine yesterday, but it would be very good with couscous or even rice. Or just as it is — the potatoes are starchy, after all. It was good and filling, and I'm sure the leftovers will be even better today or tomorrow.

Ever slept on a traversin ?

If you've ever been to France and slept in a hotel, you've probably seen and even slept on a traversin. Did you know what you were sleeping on?

In France, the traversin is a standard bed accessory. I just read on English-language Wikipedia that it is also very common in countries including China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. It's not so common in America.

But we have several names for the traversin in American English. First of all, let me say that a traversin is a kind of bed pillow ... sort of. Here's a translation from French-language Wikipedia: "The traversin is sometimes considered to be a pillow. It is the same width as the bed (and is generally tubular in shape)." You could also call it a cushion.

We bought a traversin and a special pillow case for it.

Why is the traversin "sometimes" considered to be a pillow? I think it's because you use the traversin as a pillow for your pillow. In other words, while you can sleep with your head directly on the traversin if you want to, many prefer to use it a support for another kind of pillow — you rest your head on a pillow with the traversin underneath.

Like other pillows, in France the traversin has a specially made pillow case to protect it and keep it clean. The cases are easy to find. The traversin is actually one of three kinds of bed pillows you often see in France: rectangular pillows like most American pillows; square pillows that I think we call "European pillows" in the U.S.; and the cylindrical (or "tubular") traversin.

In French, another word for the traversin is « polochon ». I have to admit that I just learned that from reading French Wiki's article on the subject. The Robert dictionary, which is the standard in France, says polochon is a "familiar" term, compared to the more technically correct traversin. Another term used to describe it is « boudin », which means "sausage" — and it is certainly sausage-shaped.

I've always heard the expression « bataille de polochons » without making the connection. A « bataille de polochons » is what we call a "pillow fight" — and it's true that traversins would be excellent pillows to fight with. You could really swing them around, and have a long reach.

This is a "bolster" in American English.

In English, the technical term for travesin is "bolster" or "bolster pillow." I just read an article in which the author used the verb "to bolster" — to prop up, support — and realized that the bolster pillow actually bolsters your other pillow. In some countries, the bolster is called a "hugging pillow." And it's also known as a "body pillow" because you can hug it while you sleep and it will pillow your whole body. One source called it a "hot-dog pillow."

I'm writing about this because Walt and I just bought a traversin for the bed in our guest room. We've never had one before. This is part of our integration into French society, I guess. We have a bidet in the bathroom, but no toilet in there — it's in a separate room called the W.C. Now we have a traversin in the guest bedroom.

Pretty soon we'll be wearing berets and walking around carrying baguettes tucked under our arms.

Chasse-roue or bouteroue

You learn something every day. The Beaver asked yesterday, in a comment, what people call those little stumps of rock or concrete that you see up against the frames or posts of big doorways and gateways in France. Walt was sitting on one in Salers when I took his picture (here's a link to the photo that I posted yesterday). And here's a closer view, where you can see the object in question. Actually, Walt is sitting on one.

Sitting on a chasse-roue in Salers

I found several French sites that describe these things and show pictures of them. The object is called called « un chasse-roue » [shah-SROO] or « une bouteroue » [boo-TROO]. It was a Google image search on borne porte cochère that turned them up — porte cochère means "carriage entrance." These are architectural elements I've always seen in French towns and cities, but I never thought about a name for them. Here are some sites and blogs with details:

• Galerie Marc Maison à Paris
• Tours 3700 : inventaire du patrimoine historique
• Town of Muides-sur-Loire

Detail of the gate decoration in Salers

The two terms are also in the Grand Larousse Electronique dictionary:

CHASSE-ROUE n. m. — Techn. (anciennt). Borne ou arc métallique placé à l'angle d'une porte, d'un mur... pour en écarter les roues des voitures.

BOUTEROUE n. f. — Technique ou histoire. Borne placée à l'angle d'un édifice, d'un mur, d'une porte pour en écarter les roues des voitures.

When the dictionary says « voitures », it doesn't mean modern automobiles. It means horse-drawn carts, wagons, or carriages. These chasse-roues (that's the plural form given in the Robert dictionary) are left over from earlier centuries, when « voitures » had large wooden or metal wheels. Hitting a chasse-roue wouldn't damage the vehicle and the chasse-roue would protect the wall or the door post. Nowadays, you can badly damage your car if you scrape a chasse-roue pulling into our out of a doorway or gateway, as The Beaver pointed out.

Two pictures I took this morning at sunrise —
fog in the river valley down the hill from our hamlet...

...and the sunrise itself.
Click on the pictures to see them at full size. I posted them a little larger than usual.

In searching for pictures of bornes I also found a very interesting site called Martian Spoken Here. The word "Martian" is a bilingual pun on the French word « mauricien », and the subject of the blog is the French dialect spoken on the Ile Maurice — the island of Mauritius — in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa. If you read French you will enjoy it.

Salers, the people

Where are all the people in these Auvergne villages? That's the question that Melinda asked in a comment yesterday. It's true that the villages we visited were not crowded. We weren't there in tourist season, but just after it ended. And it was rainy, which doesn't encourage people to go out unless they absolutely have to.

It's not just in the Auvergne where you drive into French villages that look completely deserted, though. The same thing happens in the Loire Valley. I remember the day we drove back to Saint-Aignan from Paris. It was August 31. We drove across the Loire at Beaugency and headed into the Sologne forest, on our way to Chambord.

A park in Salers on a foggy Wednesday morning in
September — where is everybody?

The villages looked shuttered and empty of life. Maybe it's because not a lot of houses have front yards, or front porches. Especially in the towns and villages. So you don't see people, and you don't know if they are in a hidden courtyard somewhere, inside their houses, or just not there at all. Where is everybody?

One thing that really gives you the impression that the villages are deserted is the closed shutters. In villages and towns, the streets are often very narrow. If your house has windows on the street side, especially on the ground floor, you probably keep the shutters closed a lot of the time. Otherwise, people walking by can look into your rooms, and cars driving by can be loud and stinky. Pollution dirties you windows.

As lunchtime approached and the sun broke through the fog,
people started appearing in the streets of Salers.

So you keep your shutters closed on the street side and live on the courtyard or back yard side of the building. But it's also true that a lot of the villages are underpopulated these days. In other words, a lot of the houses are occupied only seasonally, by people who live and work in cities but enjoy spending vacations in the country. The shutters on those houses are nearly always closed.

The time of day and the weather also have a lot to do with making a village look deserted. When it's lunchtime, all activity stops. Unless you happen upon a café or restaurant with outdoor seating, you don't see anybody. People are inside, eating. Most are eating at home. In France, people still eat their meals on a schedule, and they sit around a table — unlike what happens so much in America. Here, lunch is at noon, or at 1:00. Not at 3:00 or 4:00. Dinner, a light meal, is at 8:00, more or less. Not at 5:00.

Still, you couldn't say the streets were bustling.

One clue to look for is windowboxes full of flowers. If there are flowers, there is somebody there to water them. The building is not abandoned, even if the shutters are all closed up.

I remember once going to visit the little town of Noyon (pop. 15,000), north of Paris and near Laon and Soissons, with a couple of American friends. I believe it was a Saturday in September 1994, and the weather was nice. (It hard to believe it was 15 years ago.) We drove into the town at noontime, maybe 1:00 or close to 2:00, thinking we would have a picnic somewhere and see the town's fine cathedral. We had packed a lunch.

And yes, the church in Noyon is a cathedral, which is surprising. Most churches are not cathedrals, but a lot of Americans don't realize that. I hear the term misused all the time, or read it on travel forums about France. A cathedral is a church presided over by a bishop. It's the seat of a bishopric. Saint-Aignan doesn't have a cathedral. Blois does. Tours does.

Windowboxes full of flowers are a clue.

Cathedrals are usually in big cities. That's why it's surprising that Noyon has a cathedral — it's a small town. But Charlemagne was crowned King of the Francs there, in 768 — more than 1,200 years ago.

When we got to Noyon, our friends looked around and asked: "Is this a ghost town? It's completely deserted." When they said that, I realized that the streets did seem almost spookily empty. There were cars parked around, not not a cat was to be seen. That's a French expression: « Il n'y avait pas un chat. » It means there's nobody around. I thought about it and told them: "It's because it's lunchtime." I don't think they believed me.

By the way, these American friends had rented an apartment on the top floor of a building right off the Place Monge in Paris. They said they thought the building was basically abandoned. They never saw or heard another person the whole week they stayed there. Walt and I walked up the apartment at least once, and on every floor there were doors with doorbells labeled with last names. People definitely lived there. They were just very quiet and very discreet, not wanting to disturb each other. And during the day they were probably at work, having left early and getting home fairly late in the evening. It was a nice building, and typically Parisian.

In Salers, a tour bus had apparently come in. We tried
to avoid getting tangled up in this crowd, and
I didn't want them in too many of my pictures.

But back to Noyon — that September day, we went into the cathedral and looked around. We found a bench on the church grounds where we could eat the picnic lunch we had brought with us. It was getting to be 4:00 p.m. or so by the time we went back to the car to continue on to Laon, where there is a more famous cathedral to see.

In Noyon at four o'clock, the streets were suddenly crowded with people. Couples strolled arm in arm down the town's main pedestrian street. Some pushed strollers or baby carriages. Children played and rode bicycles. There was an atmosphere of merriment. Shops were open for business.

The contrast with the scene of desertion that had greeted us a couple of hours earlier was astonishing. Lunch had been eaten. It was time to go out for a walk and enjoy the nice sunny weather. In September, you never know if you'll have another sunny weekend day before springtime.

There is always one suspicious-looking character
lurking down a side street.

So take all that into consideration when you drive into a French town or village that seems eerily quiet and empty. Maybe it's just not the right time of day, or the right day of the week. If it's a Monday, most towns will be quiet. Many have a market once a week, and on that day you will see people out and about. But most days the place will be quiet.

When we drove into the Loire Valley on August 31, it was surprising to us to see whole villages where there was not a soul in sight. You can't help but wonder if anybody really lives in them. But we were out early in the afternoon. People were probably finishing their lunch, but another factor was surely at play. It was really hot. I mean the sun was beating down and the temperature must have been in the 80s.

Typical street scene...

So all the people were indoors, digesting and maybe napping during the heat of the day. And one way you keep your house cool is to close the shutters to block out the hot sun. It was also a Monday. That's the real day of rest in France, after the shopping on Saturday, and on Sunday morning, and the cooking and eating of Sunday dinner. The shops are mostly closed on Mondays. People who work all weekend take the day off, and rest up.

One more thing about my pictures — I try to avoid taking pictures of people. And sometimes if there are people in the pictures that I don't want you to see, I just take them out using Photoshop.

Picturesque Tournemire

There are so many picturesque towns and villages and landscapes in France that the picturesque is almost ordinary. We struggle not to get too jaded.

Earlier, I said that Tournemire, near Salers in the Cantal, was picturesque so I thought I ought to post a few pictures I took as we walked through the village. The main street runs east to west toward the château, on the side of a ridge overlooking a very green valley.

Views from the main street in Tournemire

Meanwhile, I've been re-reading The Food of France, a 1958 book by Waverly Root. Root was the food columnist at the International Herald Tribune for many years. I recommend his book as a source of information about regional cooking in France — and as an overview of French geography and history, for that matter. Right now, I'm reading Root's chapter on the food of the Auvergne region.

All these were taken from the main street in the village of Tournemire

Here is what he says about la truffade, which he calls by its name in the Auvergne dialect, truffado:

Truffado is the most typical potato dish of the Auvergne, but there are differences of opinion about how to prepare it. In the Aurillac region, the potatoes are mashed and mixed with fresh cheese. In some other regions potatoes fried with lard and perhaps seasoned with garlic have little cubes of fresh cheese added to them at the last moment.

At Tournemire, overlooking a farmhouse
down in the valley

Aurillac is the main town in the Cantal département, and it's half an hour south of Salers by car. Root continues, mentioning Mont Dore, which is a ways north of Salers:

There are other variations, both within the Auvergne and in surrounding provinces, where the basic potato-fresh-cheese combination may turn up under the name of aligot, alicot, or aligout, depending on regional dialect. At Mont Dore, grated cheese is beaten into liquid mashed potatoes, more grated cheese is sprinkled over the top, and the whole is then covered with melted butter and browned in the oven.

The church tower in Tournemire

I bet you think I might as well change the name of my blog to Living the Life in the Auvergne, no?

Lace curtains and worn steps on Touremire's main street

Along with The Food of France, I'm also reading a book about the whole Auvergne region. It's called Auvergne & the Massif Central, written by Rex Grizell and first published in 1989. It's fairly entertaining and very informative.

A sunrise, and a shopping expedition

Yesterday was a strange weather day. It was warm in the morning, and almost hot in the afternoon. Our thermometer registered 26C — that's nearly 80F. That might be a record high for an October 7. It wasn't especially sunny either.

And then in the evening we had a thunderstorm. The wind blew hard for a while — it had been gusty most of the afternoon — and there was brief but heavy rain. There was enough close-by lightning that we unplugged our router and DSL modem, and turned off our computers. Then we sat out on the front terrace and watched the storm blow through. With the wind and blowing rain, we started to get wet, so we had to go back inside.

Yesterday at 7:54 a.m., when the light was at its pinkest

Earlier in the day, at sunrise, I was out walking Callie. When I first went out, just before 8:00 a.m., the light was really pink, giving everything a surreal glow. As the dog and I walked out around the edge of the vineyard, I kept watching the sky change colors. And I of course was taking pictures.

7:58 — looking northeast, back toward our house

I had told Walt the morning walk would be a short one, because we planned to drive up to Blois before lunch, and we wanted to get an early start. We were curious to go to the new Auchan hypermarket (superstore) in the suburbs south of Blois. And we wanted to go up to the Asian-products superstore called Paris-Store on the north side of town to get some sauces and noodles for cooking Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai dishes.

8:04 — a panorama Iput together using three separate photos

Auchan was basically a bust. The store has a big computer and electronics section, but we didn't need anything like that. We found a traversin, a long bolster pillow that we wanted for the guestroom bed, and we got it at half the price we would have paid in Saint-Aignan. But that was about it.

8:06 — the sun peeks out from behind the trees

We looked around in Auchan's food section, but I immediately saw that the prices were higher than in our local SuperU and Intermarché stores. It's not worth it to drive all the way up to Blois just to pay higher prices for the same merchandise. So we won't be tempted to go again unless there's some specific item we need, or we just feel like getting out of the house and taking a drive.

8:07, at the farthest point from our house on this day's walk

Paris-Store was not disappointing, however. We drove through the middle of Blois (pop. 70,000 or so), which is what passes for a city in our département (le Loir-et-Cher). It has neighborhoods that are so typical of a provincial city, and it's always interesting to sight-see along the way. We really are certified country bumpkins nowadays.

At Paris-Store we found most of what we were looking for — products like sesame oil and oyster sauce that we can't get in Saint-Aignan. Then I asked the man who runs the store if he had tofu in tins. We've bought it that way at Asian supermarkets in Paris, and it's handy because we can't buy fresh tofu here in Saint-Aignan. The canned tofu is not as good as fresh, but it's not bad and better than none at all. It turned out that Paris-Store was out of stock for now. Maybe next time.

8:18 — arriving at home, out by our back gate

Be that as it may, the October 7 sunrise was one of the best in a long time. It's so nice to be out in the vineyard all alone — well, with Callie and, in the distance, a guy on a grape-harvesting machine bringing in another few loads of ripe grapes — early in the morning in nice weather. I don't get tired of it, even though I've been taking walks out there nearly every day for 6 years now. And Callie would be a very unhappy puppy if we didn't go every day. It's probably her greatest pleasure in life.

The dark church at Tournemire

Of course every village has its church. In fact, that's the definition of the term village in French: a place with a church and some houses. If it doesn't have a church, it's not a un village but a un hameau, a hamlet, like the one we live in near Saint-Aignan.

Tournemire is a village with both a church and a château. It's in the Cantal département, which is in the Auvergne région, which is in turn part of the French geographical zone called Le Massif Central — the central highlands.

Maisons à Tournemire, l'un des plus beaux villages de France

When we got to Tournemire, on little winding roads with steep drop-offs, the rain let up for a few minutes. We all had raincoats or umbrellas, and there was no wind to speak of, so we decided to park on the edge of the village — at one end, actually — and walk through the main street over to the château, which we had seen from above. The sky cooperated.

The village from above. That's the church on the right.

The village seemed pretty much deserted. It was early September, and a Wednesday. And it had been raining for a day or two, after all. There were maybe two or three other cars in the parking lot near the tourist office, along with our two. One of the first places we saw on our walk was the Auberge de Tournemire, the Tournemire Inn, which operates a crêperie/restaurant.

A heart with a dagger through it, no?

That sounded like a good place to have lunch after our walk. I stopped in and made a reservation for five at 12:15. No problem. We looked at the menu. One of the house specialties was the regional specialty called La Truffade (here's my topic about this potato dish). It was served with a salad as a light lunch, or with meat or sausages and salad for something a little more substantial. There were crêpes, but just for dessert.

"I am the Immaculate Conception."

The village was so picturesque you might have thought you were on a movie set or in a theme park. But the houses are massive, stone constructions, built out of the local black lava — this is in the middle of the Parc des Volcans d'Auvergne, after all. The village has to be a thousand years old, or older.

We didn't see any more dining establishments as we walked through the main street, so we were glad we had made a reservation for lunch when we did. We were headed out into the volcano park, and I doubted we would find any other place to eat. There was one café in Tournemire, with a sign and a couple of tables out on the sidewalk, and with a beautiful view out over the valley down below. But it seemed to be shut up tight.

We liked this stained-glass knight.

Soon we came to the church. The door was wide open, so we went it. It was very dark inside, being built, like the houses, of that black lava stone. And remember, the light was gray and dim outside that day too.

The interior seemed very primitive; that was probably the darkness, which gave you the impression that there were probably spider webs and dust balls in all the corners. Who knew what was hiding in there. The chairs that took the place of pews were not arranged in straight rows. They were kind of a jumble, as if people had left in a hurry. On the positive side, I guess that means the church is used.

L'Eglise de Tournemire en Auvergne
(I had to lighten up the picture in Photoshop.)

According to a book I read, one of the treasures of the church in Tournemire is a thorn from Christ's crown of thorns, brought back from the Holy Land by a crusader in the Middle Ages. We didn't see it, but that's not surprising. It was too dark in there.

At the end of our little tour I found Jesus. Oh, that doesn't sound right. I mean I peered into a corner and noticed a figure reclining in a low cranny, near the floor, in darkness. It was a representation of Christ in his tomb. I used my flash to snap a picture.