Views through a glass block window

We have a glass block window on the south-facing wall of our house. It's the only window on that side, facing the street. According to local building codes, it needs to be a glass-block window because that wall is very close to the property line. It's too close to allow for putting in a standard glass window — one you could see through.

Well, not really too close, we've found out. A couple of years ago, I spoke to our neighbor the mayor of the village about it, and she said she would be glad to give us permission to put in a real window there. Since there's no house on the lot directly across the street, it wouldn't be hard to justify an exception to the rule. Fact is, we kind of like the glass blocks.

A glass block, or brique de verre

When it's sunny, the glass blocks let in a lot of heat. That helps heat up the house when the weather outside isn't especially warm. When it is warm or hot outside, we just open all the other windows and let the heat out. Seldom is it so hot that we feel like we might roast alive. That hasn't really happened since 2003. And even then, it could be that we just weren't used to hot weather again, after living for eight years in cool (I mean chilly), foggy San Francisco.

Through a glass block, blurrily
You can click the picture to see an enlargement.

Truthfully, the glass block window was not in good shape when we moved in eight years ago, and this is the first time we've done anything to improve its appearance. Recently, I scraped and sanded all around inside the window frame, and I used some enduit de lissage — "smoothing putty," a kind of Spackle — to prepare the surfaces for painting.

Two views of the same window — on the left, from below
in the daytime; on the right, from above at night

Then I repainted not just the inside of the frame, but also all the old grout between the blocks. The grout had turned a little black, and there were signs of mildew in the concrete. Before painting it, I washed everything down with a strong bleach solution.

And I didn't worry about "staying in the lines" as I painted. The inside surface of the glass blocks is smooth. Now I just have to scrub off the extra paint. If you look closely, you can see two blocks that I've cleaned as an experiment to see if my plan works. It does. "After" shots to come.

Gardening, etc.

Having a vegetable garden in the summer has everything to do with living the life in Saint-Aignan. It seems like every house in the area has one, and you see people out working their soil or weeding or harvesting crops — selon la saison — all the time.

The man down the hill from us, at the main road, has an enormous garden. You could almost call it a farm. His name is François and he grows tons of potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, and who knows what all. He's out there every time we drive past, unless it's raining. And right now, it's not. I don't know what he can do with all that produce, unless he sells some of it, or supplies a huge extended family.

The four garden plots, including a little rhubarb patch
and a long row where we have lettuces, radishes,
and leeks already growing.

People who live in town have garden allotments on the island in the Cher across from Saint-Aignan. It's easy enough to walk over there from town, or drive. Each allotment seems to have a shed of some kind on it, and I think they all have running water. The soil looks to be loamy and rich down there in the river valley.

The sky over the vineyard at sunset day before yesterday

Our soil is « de la terre à vignes » — soil that's really only good for growing grape vines. It's hard clay, and full of rocks. We've been working on improving the spot where we first tilled up our four garden plots in 2004. Yesterday, Walt emptied one of our compost piles, by the wheelbarrow load, onto three of the plots. We keep two compost piles going so that we always have some that's ready to use while the other one does its thing — as they say, "compost happens."

One of the neighborhood cherry trees is full of fruit. But it's
the only one, I can report after an inspection
tour of the hamlet yesterday.

Meanwhile, May 15 has now passed and it's time to set out the tomatoes, eggplants, and all. Walt is still hardening them off, exposing them gradually to more and more sun, in preparation for planting them in the ground. For the time being, they are still under the cold frames.

I did a Photoshop mock-up of the red wall with the
batik on it, to see what it will look like after Walt
actually applies red paint over the white.

The ground all around us is dry and powdery, especially the plots that I've tilled again with the rotary cultivator. I did that yesterday — it was a second tilling session for all four plots. The fresh compost got all mixed in. I picked up a lot of egg-sized rocks as I tilled and flung them out over the fence, into the little wood that grows over there. If anybody ever cuts down all those trees and tries to work that soil, he or she will find it as rocky as a Mediterranean beach.

Shrimp, gombos, and Louisiana gumbo

In French — mostly African French, but also in France when necessary — okra are called gombos. You can't find them everywhere, that's for sure. The best source we've found so far is a little Asian grocery store up in Blois, nearly an hour's drive from Saint-Aignan. We were up there last Thursday.

I bought a kilo of fresh okra. The woman at the cash register of the little shop was surprised that I was buying a product that, she said, is mostly bought by her African customers. I explained that okra was very popular in the southern U.S., among black and white people alike. And then I started thinking about what I would do with such a lot of fresh okra.

Louisiana gumbo with rice and grilled shrimp

Gumbo, I thought — I haven't made that in years. The extra okra I would blanch and freeze for later. Making gumbo meant we needed some celery and green peppers, so Walt went to the market Saturday morning. Onions, green pepper, and celery are the usual aromatic vegetables used in Louisiana dishes like gumbo and jambalaya.

Blanched (parboiled) okra pods

The first step in making a thick, rich, soupy gumbo is to make a roux. Not a French-style roux of butter and flour that you turn into a white sauce or béchamel, but a brown roux. What you do is heat up about half a cup of vegetable oil in a pan and the sprinkle in about half a cup of flour. You stir that well and let that cook on medium heat for 30 minutes, more or less, until the flour turns a nice medium brown color, without letting it scorch.

A brown roux with onions, celery, green pepper,
herbs, and lardons cooking in it

The brown roux is both a thickening and a flavor ingredient. While it's cooking, chop up a large onion, a green bell pepper, and two or three stalks of celery. Add them to the brown roux and let it all cook together for another 45 minutes to an hour. Season with salt and pepper, and add some dried herbs — thyme, rosemary, and a couple of bay leaves, for example. Optionally, toss in a cup of lardons or diced ham too.

Add the parboiled okra pods to the vegetable-roux mixture

The next step is to add okra. Whether frozen or fresh, the okra needs to be cooked briefly in a little water or sautéed in oil before it goes into the roux mixture. Okra, whether added whole or sliced, will thicken the sauce. Add a chopped fresh tomato too, for flavor and color.

The finished gumbo after long, slow cooking

Once all the vegetables and seasonings are in and cooking, add liquid. If you're making shrimp gumbo, use shrimp broth that you make by boiling the shrimp shells in water for a few minutes. Or use chicken or vegetable broth, or even just water. You need about a liter (a quart) of liquid to make this much gumbo.

Grilled spicy shrimp

Now it just simmers for an hour or two. It will slowly thicken as it reduces. Everything is already cooked. Toward the end of the cooking time, when you think the gumbo is about ready, add some shrimp or some cooked chicken or sausage to the pan. Raw shrimp will cook quickly, say in 4 or 5 minutes. Or you can cook the shrimp separately like we did — on skewers on the grill. Any other meat you add to the gumbo should already be cooked so it just needs to heat through.

Grilled shrimp, yellow rice, and Louisiana gumbo – with gombos

The only other step is to cook some rice or grits/polenta to eat with the thick, rich gumbo. Enjoy. And don't forget the Tabasco or other hot sauce at the table.

More Paris photos

The garden is all tilled and good to go. The weather is all chilled and not so conducive. It's not exactly cold outside, but it's much cooler than it has been. Today is the 15th, and the saints de glace are over — that's the May 11, 12, and 13 saints' days, which are supposed by popular wisdom to be chilly with a chance of frost in northern France.

The weather will warm up again and we'll set plants out in the garden plots this week — too many tomatoes (but can you really have too many fresh tomatoes?), a lot of eggplants (ditto), pumpkins, cucumbers, golden sunburst squash (thanks to a friend), and others crops. Corn, haricot vert, and lima bean seeds will go directly into the ground.

Meanwhile, here are some more photos from that April 1 we spent in Paris in 2002.

Le Centenaire, avenue de la Tour-Maubourg

Le Centenaire, in the picture above, is a big café/brasserie on the avenue de la Tour-Maubourg, at the corner of the rue de l'Université. That's in the 7e arrondissement, near Invalides and not very far from the Eiffel Tower. We once had a memorable meal at the Centenaire.

Another café we've always liked is Le Champs de Mars, near
the Eiffel Tower. You could call it touristy, but the food —
steaks, dinner salads — is usually excellent.

It was in 1995. We had cut short a vacation in the Lot, at Puy-l'Evêque, to take a short side trip to Provence. It was October, and as we headed on north to Paris, where we didn't have a hotel room reserved, we had the idea of calling a vacation apartment rental agency in California to see if they had any last-minute vacancies. They did — a studio apartment on a quiet little street in the 7th. We booked it, giving them a credit card number over the phone for the payment.

People enjoying food and drink on the place de
l'Ecole-Militaire — nobody we know, however

When we arrived in Paris at noontime that October day, it was starting to rain. It was a Sunday, so the neighborhood was quiet and a lot of businesses and even restaurants were closed. We were hungry. Luckily, the Centenaire was open. We ate a roast chicken that was about the best either one of us had ever tasted, and had a side of pommes frites (French fries) and a little bottle of red wine. As I said, it was memorable. We still talk about it today.

I like this mirror image picture of a chalkboard menu.

I've been back to the Centenaire several times over the years, but the food has never been as good as that first time. Cafés are notoriously changeable. The quality of the food and the cooking all depends on who happens to be doing the ordering and working in the kitchen at any given time. Sometimes you luck out; sometimes not.

Another popular place in the 7th, the Café le Dôme

We stayed in apartments in the 7th arrondissement four or five times in the 1990s. It's more or less a residential neighborhood, but with a lot of cafés and restaurants. It also has a good if touristy market street in the rue Cler (of Rick Steves fame), and a great market on Thursday and Saturday mornings on the avenue de Saxe.

A rue St-Dominque street scene

The 7th isn't exactly central Paris, but it is in the inner ring of arrondissements, and you can walk to nearly anywhere in central Paris from there. It's a fancy neighorbood, in fact, with expensive shopping streets like the rue St-Dominique. When Michelle and Barack Obama were in Paris a few years ago, they had dinner at a 7th arrondissement restaurant called la Fontaine de Mars.

La Terrasse is a big café near the rue Cler at Ecole-Militaire

A couple of times we noticed well-known political figures in shops — National Assembly president Jean-Louis Debré shopping in a produce market on rue Cler, or former government minister Michèle Alliot-Marie at a café on the avenue de la Tour-Maubourg. We enjoyed all our stays in that part of Paris.

April in Paris

Wow, it's actually raining outside this morning! This is the first time we've had real rain in so long — I'm tempted to say "in living memory." Let's hope it continues for a while and we get some significant water out of it. It's time to plant the garden now, and the soil needs moisture.

On the rue de Buci in Paris on April 1, 2002

With the Blogger outage yesterday, I was able to focus on yard work rather than blogging. I tilled up two more garden plots. The ground was like concrete – it's mostly clay, and clay has two states: squishy-muddy, or harder than rock. Since it hadn't rained in a long time... well, you get the picture.

The Blogger outage was a first, if I remember correctly. I've been blogging for 5½ years now, and never before have I not been able to post anything because of a Blogger outage. In the past, we've had DSL outages. We've had power outages. And there have been days when Blogger wouldn't accept pictures. But a total Blogger outage was a new experience.

Another café on the rue de Buci that April 1 evening

In a comment on my last post, Judy a.k.a. Seine Judith, asked about a picture she noticed in one of my photos of our ongoing renovations and re-decorating. It's the first picture above. I said in a comment that it was a picture of Walt's, but it turns out to be one that I took. It was April 1, 2002, and we had arrived in Paris 48 hours earlier for a two week vacation. Over the weekend we had gone to the Casino de Paris for a concert by Alain Souchon, and to the Olympia for one by Serge Lama. We were jet-lagged, exhausted, and ecstatic.

Le Café des Deux Magots, and the Café de Flore in the background

The apartment we had rented for the vacation was on the rue Mayet, just off rue de Sèvres near métro Duroc. On Monday, April Fool's Day, Walt and I wandered around nearby Saint-Germain-des-Près, the neighborhood where he and I — and Judy — spent a lot of time back in 1981-82. Actually, she and Walt both lived for a while in a pension de famille there, on rue du Four.

La Brasserie Lipp, a St-Germain institution

It was a beautiful evening, and I was taking pictures with one of my first digital cameras, a Kodak DC4800. It was a clunky camera by today's standards, but I always liked the pictures it took. I was enjoying the look and colors of all the cafés and restaurants, which were just turning on their inside lights and their neon signs, and the nice weather.

La Taverne St-Germain

That April trip to Paris was, unbeknownst to us at the time, our last actual vacation in France before becoming residents. By April 2003, we had come back to France, found a house to buy near Saint-Aignan, and become homeowners here. We both quit our jobs that year before moving ourselves, our dog, and all our possessions to this house that we are still in the process of improving and renovating.

Random remarks and renovation pictures

Okay, Blogger is back. It was touch and go for a few minutes there.

We woke up to a strange sound at four o'clock this morning —
a hard rain falling. It apparently didn't last very long though. Nothing looks very wet outside.

Looking out the kitchen window at 7:45 a.m. today,
I saw a rare sight: a puddle.

The news is that there was a damaging earthquake in Spain. The old town of Lorca, in the southeast, reports 8 dead and nearly 175 injured. Buildings are down, including the steeple of the old church. It feels like the earthquakes are coming this way. That worries me. Saint-Aignan supposedly had a significant earthquake in 1715.

Before and after shots of our stairwell and landing

Here in France, the government has decided to take down all the signs that for the past few years have warned drivers that they are about to pass a speed-control camera. Now there's no warning. People will have to obey the speed limits at all times, not just when there's a camera. Imagine!

And they say they are going to put another one thousand cameras on the roads all around the country. They are also considering lowering the speed limit in cities and towns from
50 kph (30 mph) to 30 kph (20 mph). April was a deadly month on French highways.

Yesterday Walt put up his Albany cousin's painting.

Woody Allen's film that he shot in Paris is causing a big sensation at the Cannes film festival. I don't know if the film is really good or if the French media are just excited that Allen filmed it in France. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French First Lady, has a minor role in it.

Walt also put up the Touraine vineyards map
that we recently had mounted and framed.

France 2 news reports that a shopping trip to a big supermarket in Germany costs 30% less than the same shopping trip in France. A lot of French people who live along the border with Germany are doing their shopping there. Since the adoption of the euro, it's very easy to compare prices in other euro countries with prices in France.

Another view of the new stair, and a close-up of a print
we have of a Monet painting called La Rue Montorgueil.
I used to live on that street in Paris.

There's a proposal to abolish the income tax in France. Income taxes represent only 6% of the French government's revenues. I'm surprised that figure is so low. I wonder if most of the government's revenues don't come from the VAT tax and the taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, which are very high.

Looking down from the top floor

The pictures in this post show some of the work we've been doing in the house lately. We are getting there — slowly but surely. I'm still working on the glass block windows but I should finish today.

Meat pies and hachis

It's interesting to read about shepherd's pie and cottage pie. An anonymous comment on yesterday's post called my attention to them and the terminology. When I was growing up in North Carolina, we made and ate shepherd's pie, and we made it with potatoes and ground beef. And then I came to France and had hachis parmentier, which was to me approximately the same thing.

We didn't use the term "cottage pie" for the version made with beef. But then, we didn't eat mutton or lamb at all. It wasn't part of our diet, which was based on pork, beef, chicken, and fish/seafood. So for us there was no distinction to be made. I wonder if other Americans used the term cottage pie. Walt says his family didn't, and his mother's shepherd's pie was also made with beef.

"Meats of France"

Here's what Wikipedia says about it:

The term cottage pie is known to have been in use in 1791, when the potato was being introduced as an edible crop affordable for the poor (cf. "cottage" meaning a modest dwelling for rural workers).

In early cookery books, the dish was a means of using leftover roasted meat of any kind, and the pie dish was lined with mashed potato as well as having a mashed potato crust on top.

The term "shepherd's pie" did not appear until the 1870s, and since then it has been used synonymously with "cottage pie", regardless of whether the principal ingredient was beef or mutton. There is now a popular tendency for "shepherd's pie" to be used when the meat is mutton or lamb, with the suggested origin being that shepherds are concerned with sheep and not cattle. This may, however, be an example of folk etymology.

The American Joy of Cooking book has an entry and recipe for shepherd's pie in which it mentions that the British make a distinction between such casseroles made with lamb or mutton — "shepherd's pie" — and ones made with beef — "cottage pie." It says such pies are a favorite "pub food" in England and Ireland.

My Webster's New World Dictionary (1974) has an entry for "shepherd's pie" — "a meat pie baked with a top crust of mashed potatoes," it says, without specifying the meat used. The same dictionary has no entry for "cottage pie."

Yesterday's sky at sunset

As an aside, let me mention that when I was growing up in North Carolina, people distinguished the two kinds of potatoes available this way: there were "Irish potatoes" and "sweet potatoes."

Sometimes the simplest, most common things have a very complicated history. And geographical differences in language complicated things even more. That's why some say that the English language is gradually breaking down into dialects that are no longer mutually comprehensible. I know I often have trouble understanding British or Irish speakers of English, especially when they are talking with each other and not directly to me. Accent, vocabulary, and unfamiliar expressions get in the way of comprehension.

I'm making another salt-cured duck breast "ham" —
this one flavored with dried rosemary and black pepper

A cottage in England, for example is one thing, and we Americans, I think, know the British meaning — a small, modest dwelling out in the country. But if you mention "cottage" where I grew up, the image the term calls up is a summer house at the beach. The summer house might be small and "cottage-like" in the British sense of the term, but it is just as likely to be a grand structure on two or three stories with many bedrooms and bathrooms. Wealthy people owned beach cottages — they would be called résidences secondaires in French.

And then there's hachis parmentier in France. I've seen recipes that vary widely in the number of layers of mashed potato and chopped or ground meat. The simplest version is just hash on the bottom and potato on top. And the Larousse Gastronomique gives a recipe in which the meat hash is stuffed into baked potatoes ("jacket potatoes" in British) that have been partially scooped out. There are as many versions of hachis parmentier as there are cooks, it seems.

I'm also working on this glass block window —
cleaning, sanding, and painting the sills and the grouting.

The Parmentier of hachis parmentier fame, by the way, was a French scientist who greatly promoted the potato as a food for human consumption, back when the plant was grown mostly as an ornamental — the tubers were fed to livestock. He died in 1813. The Paris Faculty of Medecine had declared potatoes edible in 1772, but people were still reluctant to eat them. They were thought by some to cause leprosy. Tomatoes, too, were considered dangerous or poisonous for many many generations before Europeans finally figured out they were not only edible but delicious.

Here's a link to a recipe for hachis parmentier au canard on the French Marmiton cooking site. That's a kind of shepherd's pie made with a hash of chopped or shredded meat from slow-cooked duck legs and thighs. And here's a recipe for a parmentier de lapin, purée au chèvre — a pie made with a hash of rabbit meat and vegetables, and mashed potatoes that include melted goat cheese. I guess the possibilities are endless.

Rabbit and potato pie

I haven't posted about food and cooking in a while. Actually, the pictures in this post date back to April 22-24. I had made rillettes de lapin a few days before, and some of the meat was still in the freezer. Since rillettes are nice shredded meat, well seasoned, I thought I could make the rabbit equivalent of a shepherd's pie — called un hachis parmentier in French — with some of them.

Hachis parmentier with rabbit and vegetables

Here's what you do — this is not so much a recipe as an idea or method. To start, sautee some vegetables — sliced onions, julienned carrots, and sliced fresh mushrooms — with pepper, dried thyme, and bay leaves as seasonings.

Cook vegetables...

When the vegetables have begun to cook, add in the shredded rabbit and let it cook for a few more minutes. The rabbit is already cooked, and the vegetables will finish cooking in the oven with mashed potatoes, so the mixture doesn't need to cook for long on top of the stove.

...and then add the cooked, shredded rabbit meat

Boil some potatoes and mash them with butter and cream or milk. Make a stiff mash that will hold its shape, and season it with pepper, a little salt (depending on the saltiness of the rabbit and vegetable mixture), and a pinch of grated nutmeg.

Mashed potatoes

Put the rabbit and vegetable mixture, or part of it, into the bottom of a baking dish or terrine. Spoon mashed potatoes over the top and then spread them over the whole surface. You can use as thin or as thick a layer of potatoes as you want — same with the rabbit and vegetable hash.

A layer of the rabbit and vegetable mixture,
and on top a layer of mashed potato

If all the ingredients are still hot, put the terrine or terrines in a hot oven and cook them until the potato is nice and browned. If the potatoes and hash have cooled down, put them in a medium oven so that everything will have time to heat through again before the top gets too brown.

A variation on shepherd's pie

At this point, you can spoon the pie onto plates and eat it hot. Don't burn your mouth!

Rabbit and potato pie

If you let the potato pie cool completely in the fridge, you can cut thick slices of it, re-heat them in the oven, and serve the rabbit and potato pie as you see it in the first and last pictures above. It looks fancier but tastes the same.

And of course you can make the same kind of pie using shredded cooked beef, pork, turkey, duck, or chicken. Corned beef would be good. Or smoked chicken.

Enjoying the Saint-Aignan summer

I just can't help feeling that we are having all of our summer weather now. Yesterday we spent the afternoon visiting friends and eating a long leisurely lunch outdoors, under a big tilleul or linden tree. It was warm and pleasant in the shade. It would have been too hot in the sun.

Sky view over the vineyard yesterday at 9:00 p.m.

Weather forecasts say this weather will continue until at least the end of the week. That means I need to go out and do some watering. And it gives me plenty of time to till up the last two garden plots this week. Walt has 47 (!) tomato seedlings ready to go into the garden, along with 30 or so aubergine (eggplant) and some squash, cucumber, and various other plants.

You do days of painting and this is what you end up with.
At least it's all clean.

Meanwhile, I finished the painting upstairs but I still have three more doors to paint. I'll put them on sawhorses down in the
garage and do them there, if Bertie will let me. I don't need an abundance of short black cat hairs sticking to every painted surface. It should be interesting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When we first saw
the house and moved in,
not only the walls
and ceilings but also
the door panels were
covered in the same
old-fashioned wallpaper.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The changing landscape, part 2 — food

Saint-Aignan has changed more than our village has, but if you had been here 10 years ago and just came back today, you might not notice. The town has been prettied up slightly. For example, six or seven years ago the main street was completely dug up and then redone in paving stones instead of asphalt.

Last year, they did the same thing to the square — la place de la Paix — where the open-air market is held every Saturday morning. That job took longer than planned and the result was a mess, but now they seem to have gotten it under control. Walt and I were down there yesterday and saw that they have marked out new parking spaces and installed big planter boxes for summertime flowers.

When we came here in 2003, there were two charcuterie shops — French delicatessens — in town. Both of those have now gone out of business. One of the former charcuteries stands empty, and the other one has been converted into a shop specializing in women's lingerie. There are two butcher shops in town, still, and both of them also sell some of the hams and sausages you expect to find in a charcuterie. Oh, and there is also a boucherie chevaline — a horse meat butcher.

One little grocery store in the old town shut down several years ago, and the space it occupied has been taken over by an insurance agency. The other grocery store in town changed owners and brands a couple of years ago. It has a complete butcher and deli counter, so it fills the void left by the charcuteries that are now gone. As was the case eight years ago, there are still no cheese, produce, or seafood shops in town. Three or four years ago, an organic products — produce, honey, wines, and so on — opened up near the main square, but it went out of business after a year or two.

In 2003, there were four bread bakeries (des boulangeries) and one pastry shop (une pâtisserie) in Saint-Aignan. Now there are just three boulangeries — the other two closed down two or three years ago. All of them sell some pastries, of course, but there's no longer a specialized pâtisserie.

However, there are two Asian delis now, one on the market square and one on the main street. If you want Chinese or Thai dishes, you're in luck. These didn't exist in Saint-Aignan eight years ago. One of them took over a storefront that was a book shop until three or four years ago, when the woman who ran it was killed by a hit-and-run driver — she and her husband were walking along the main street in the village where they lived when it happened.

So there's no bookshop in Saint-Aignan. There is, however, a maison de la presse, a newsstand, where there are some books and maps on sale. There are several gift shops, and there's a little gourmet grocery store — a Hédiard outlet. There was a stationer's shop for a year or two, but it recently closed down. And a few years ago somebody opened up a laundromat. I remember there was no laudromat in Saint-Aignan when we first moved here in 2003 and needed one.

So where do people really shop? They go to the weekly open-air market on Saturdays, of course, where there is a big seafood stand and a well-stocked cheese vendor. There are two or three charcuterie stands, several produce vendors, two or three butchers (including another horse butcher), two poultry sellers, a man who specializes in escargots, and several farmers selling goat cheeses and fresh produce. There's also a Sunday morning market over in Noyers.

And then there are of course the supermarkets. In 2003, we had three full-service supermarkets within five kilometers (three miles) of our house. French supermarkets are like mini-superstores — they sell hardware, electrics including small and even large appliances, school supplies, clothes, and shoes, for example, along with groceries. They have nice butcher, deli, and cheese counters where you can buy products à la coupe — cut to order, not pre-packaged.

Two of the three supermarkets are still in business. The third, a Champion store over in central Noyers-sur-Cher (just three miles from our house), went out of business a year or two ago. The sheet metal warehouse of a building that it occupied is slated to be torn down, I've heard. There's another supermarket, Intermarché, on the western edge of Noyers. I used to go there often, but new management came in a couple of years ago and the prices went way up.

In Saint-Aignan, we have a SuperU market. It was enlarged a few years ago, and has become the best supermarket in the area, in my opinion. There's also a so-called "hard discount" market near SuperU. It's an Ed store, and I shop there too. Its prices often are not lower than SuperU's but the store carries a few products that I like and can't get elsewhere.

Another hard-discount grocery chain, Netto, opened a store in Noyers, across from Intermarché, two or three years ago, but it went out of business after a short time. Now there's a nicer Netto market over in Montrichard where I like to shop once a month or so, just for variety's sake. Montrichard is a 10-mile drive, so I don't go there very often.

Everybody has a car nowadays. Small businesses in town centers, where parking is not always easy, struggle to survive. That's not news. It's true in all the developed countries — France too. People shop in supermarkets, usually out on the edges of the towns. In our case, we even drive up to Contres, 10 miles north, or even to Blois, 25 miles north, to shop in the larger SuperU, Auchan, Leclerc, and other hypermarchés — superstores. So does everybody else, I'm sure.

This gradual evolution toward large supermarkets isn't really new. Small shops that offer exceptionally good products can attract enough customers to make a go of it. People still want their fresh bread every day, so the boulangeries, though fewer in number, seem to thrive. There are about 10 of them within 7 or 8 miles of where we live. We would buy bread in more of them if we didn't have bread brought to our door four days a week by the village baker's porteuse de pain.

The nice thing is that we still have a choice of markets and shops. Most often we buy meat at the supermarket, but on Friday we went to one of the butcher shops because we know the meats there are top-quality. We buy often by cheese at the supermarket, but when the lines aren't too long we buy it from the cheese vendor at the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan or the Sunday market in Noyers. We buy goat cheese from the farmers who make it. And we grow a lot of our own produce.

The changing landscape, part 1

The first time Walt and I were ever in Saint-Aignan was in 1989. Yes, it was that long ago. On that day we just drove through the town on our way north to Chartres after a trip to Toulouse and Bordeaux. We hardly even noticed Saint-Aignan as we headed north.

We were focused on finding a place to eat and ended up having lunch in a little restaurant in Beaugency. To get there, we drove through the park at Chambord to see the château. We'd been on the road for a week, enjoying beautiful weather, but it started raining as we got closer to Chartres. We saw the cathedral under dark skies, in a heavy downpour.

I wish we had stopped in Saint-Aignan and looked around that day 22 years ago. The next time we came here was in December 2002, when we were looking for a house we might buy for our retirement. We found one, and then we decided to go ahead and move here — lock, stock, and barrel. In June 2003 we arrived. Lately, I've been thinking about how much the Saint-Aignan area has changed in eight years.

A blue flower and a red spider

We live at the end of what is for all practical puposes a dead-end road — a lane, really — about 700 meters (less than half a mile) off the little highway that runs along the south bank of the Cher River. We are equidistant from the main place (market square) in old Saint-Aignan and the center of the village that is officially our place of residence. From our house to central Saint-Aignan, or to the center of our village, is all of three kilometers — two miles. We're in the country but not remotely so.

When we arrived in 2003, we moved into one of nine houses that make up a hameau (hamlet) on the edge of a big vineyard. It has a name: La Renaudière but no businesses or church. The road doesn't really end at our house, in fact; it continues as a gravel track used mostly by the vignerons who own and work their plots of vines out west of our small piece of property. There isn't much through traffic, though there is some. After a mile on gravel through the vineyard, you arrive at another narrow asphalt road.

None of any of that has changed in eight years. There are still nine houses in our hamlet. Six of them are occupied full-time. Three are occupied infrequently or seasonally. Three of our neighbors have died since we moved here — two of them were a couple, both in their mid-90s, and the other one was a widow of the same age. Another neighbor is now in her late 80s.

White clover

Our next-door neighbor is a shut-in who has multiple sclerosis. He's about my age. Five other neighbors are also about my age — early to mid-60s. One house in the hamlet is now being fixed up as a vacation house by the son and daughter-in-law of the widow who died at age 95 a year or two ago. The house previously occupied by the elderly couple who died is a rental, and it's now lived in by a group of young people (20s and 30s I'd say) who are currently working as contractors, evidently, at the Saint-Aignan zoo. I don't know how many of them there are, but four or five cars are often parked in their driveway.

Out hamlet hasn't changed, but the area just a few hundred yards down the hill from us, on the other side of a dense thicket of woods, has changed considerably. In 2003, there were a dozen or so houses down there, on big lots along the road that leads up to our house. Now there are at least twice as many, and many are on very small lots. A few years ago, some people who live down there sold two or three acres of land to a developer, who promptly built 11 new houses on it. And an English couple had a small house built along the road, as did two French families.

All in all, another 15 to 20 houses have been built within a kilometer of our house, down near the highway. Many of them are on a little lane that runs parallel to our road just to the south. I'm sure that all the people living in all these houses have pushed the population (between 1000 and 1500) of our village up significantly. A little farther along the highway toward the village center, I can count another 15 or 20 houses that have been built since we first came here looking for a new home in 2002.

New houses on small lots outside Saint-Aignan

I see this as part of a demographic trend in France. People are moving back to the country, partially reversing the mass movement of people out of the countryside and into the cities, where the jobs were, over the past 100 or more years. Nowadays, with high-speed rail, expressways (autoroutes), and universal car ownership, high-speed Internet, and satellite TV, you can live out in the country in rural France without being isolated. You can commute to a city for your job and still enjoy the spaciousness and quiet of country living.

We would be pretty unhappy if the grape-growers started selling off their vineyard plots near our house and putting up houses up there. I don't see any evidence of that happening, but they do say the wine business isn't very profitable these days. There's too much wine produced in France, and too much competition world from new wine areas in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Newly built houses dot the landscape around our village

As things stand, we don't really even notice the new arrivals. Once in a while we'll see groups of people we don't know walking up our road and out into the vineyard. They're out for a stroll. As for car traffic, even down the hill where all the houses are it doesn't seem to have increased much. Maybe there's a lot to traffic down there early in the morning and late in the afternoon, with people going to or coming home from work. We're seldom down there at those hours.

Speaking of our village, it seems to be prospering. One reason, I think, is that the new autoroute that connects Saint-Aignan with Tours to the west and Vierzon and Bourges to the east — and to Orléans and Paris, actually — runs across the western end of our village's territory. it opened two or three years ago. I'm sure the village was well compensated for the land taken over by the new roadway.

Une rose est une rose est une rose

In the village center, all the electric wires were recently undergrounded. New lamp posts were put up. Sidewalks and curbs have recently been built or improved. Otherwise, there haven't been any big changes. The boulangerie has changed owners twice since 2003, and the new baker has just opened a salon de thé, replacing an old café that was seldom open for business. The café-tabac in the village also got new owners last year, but it doesn't appear to have changed significantly. Madame Barbier is still operating her salon de coiffure down there. The little grocery store changed owners — twice I think — but remains much the same as it was when we arrived.

To be continued...