Maisons normandes (3)

This is the third and last set of photos of houses in Normandy that I put together and edited this week. These aren't on the Cotentin peninsula but south and west of there, between Domfront and Alençon. I took some of them in Domfront, and others in the spa town called Bagnoles-de-l'Orne as well as in Carrouges. Some of these houses are châteaux, or manoirs at least.

Here it is June 15 and we are still having mostly chilly, cloudy weather, with heavy downpours from storms featuring lightning and thunder. This weather makes me feel like it's March instead of June, though I admit it's a little bit warmer than March weather. We hardly had any real winter weather between November 2018 and April 2019, and now I'm worried we might not have any real summer weather. I'm trying not to be a pessimist...

Maisons normandes (2)

A few days ago, when I started looking for and processing photos of houses that I took in Normandy in the early years of this century (doesn't that sound funny?), I didn't realize how many I would find. I ended up with 42 images. That made a fairly long slide show, so I divided them into three 14-image shows. I'm always surprised by the good quality of images produced by digital cameras so long ago.

All these are houses in Lower Normandy, which is the western part of the province or region. (You might call some "buildings" because they have shops, restaurants, or cafés on the ground floor, but that's not unusual for houses in France.) If I started looking for photos of houses in Upper Normandy (la Haute Normandie) I'd find so many more, because I've spent so much more time there over the years. I lived and worked for a year in that area's capital city, Rouen, back in the 1970s.

Maisons normandes (1)

Yesterday I spent another few hours going through sets of Normandy photos that I've taken over the years. I'm concentrating on the period from 2004 and 2005, when I made several trips to the Cotentin, which is a peninsula in western Normandy, north of the famous Mont Saint-Michel. Here are a few photos of houses grand and modest in Lower Normandy.

Meanwhile, life here in Saint-Aignan is just a waiting game. We're waiting for some nice weather to return. Enough with the chilly days — the afternoon high temperatures haven't barely hit 70ºF this week — and rain, rain go away. The vegetable garden and other plants need some warmth and sunshine.

The other waiting game has to do with the new bathroom we want to have built out and plumbed in up in our big loft space. The two artisans we have contracted with to do the work haven't shown up yet, even though they said they'd start working here around June 1. Major sigh. No news from them at all. We've cleared the space by moving furniture and emptying closets, and I'm getting tired of the house feeling like a jumble.

Le pois mangetout

We're having snow peas, known in French as pois gourmands or pois mangetout ("eat-all"), for lunch today. They're growing in our 2019 vegetable garden and are the first thing we've harvested this spring (with the exception of the Swiss chard that I planted in 2018 and that over-wintered out there).

Walt was going to go out and harvest our third batch of snow peas yesterday afternoon when suddenly it started... get this... snowing! Well, not exactly snowing, but sleeting. There were two bolts of lightning, then a loud rumble of thunder. The bottom fell out. The rain was so hard that I had to go look, and what I saw was a mix of big raindrops and small ice pellets. The pellets were bouncing off the hood and roof of the Citroën, which I had left parked outdoors. No damage done, thankfully.

Wikipédia says people in France and in the Netherlands have been growing, cooking, and eating pois mangetout since at least the 16th century. They are mentioned in a book published in 1526. We'll be having a stir-fry of onion, garlic, carrot, snow peas, and chicken today. We've already had similar stir-fries of snow peas, one with beef and one with shrimp, this spring.

A few days ago Walt posted a photo of the second batch of snow peas he had harvested. He planted seeds we bought here in Saint-Aignan and that are described on the label as being a pois demi-nain 40 jours — semi-dwarf peas that start producing 40 days after planting. I took the photos in the slideshow above two weeks ago.

Pommes de terre confites, etc.

 When I lived in Paris back in the mid-1970s, somebody gave me a cookbook that was published in association with the American Hospital as a fund-raising tool. Until then, I had lived in North Carolina, Illinois, and Normandy. One of the recipes in the book was for guacamole, and I remember it as being one of the most complicated concoctions ever, with 8 or 10 ingredients. At least it introduced me to the concept of avocado dip, which I made yesterday and is very simple.

Another recipe was for the potatoes you see above. I'm calling them pommes de terre confites, and I found several recipes for them on the internet when I decided I wanted to make them again. My American Hospital cookbook disappeared years ago; I don't know where it went. I wish I could find a copy of it today.

Anyway, I remember these potatoes well. I have a highly developed memory for foods that have pleased my palate. The potatoes are crispy on the outside and soft — moelleux — in the middle. The ones I cooked a few days ago were especially tasty because I cooked them in duck fat. I'm sure they would be good cooked in olive or canola oil too, but the duck fat has such good flavor.

I combined the pommes de terre confites (slow-cooked potatoes) with half a smoked chicken (purchased at the supermarket) and some garden-grown collard greens that I had in the freezer. It was an American-style meal made using French ingredients and techniques.

Here's what lunch looked like on the plate. The smokiness of the chicken, crispiness of the potatoes, and "meatiness" of the collard greens all complemented each other. Sprinkle some hot-pepper vinegar on the collards and, if you like, on the chicken. Some Dijon mustard would be good with the chicken and with the potatoes. I'll have to make all of this again soon. It's comfort food on a gray, chilly, damp day, and that's the kind of weather we're having now.

Autour du phare de Gatteville en Normandie

The Gatteville lighthouse stands on the Pointe de Barfleur and guides boats into Barfleur harbor. It's 25 meters (82 ft.) tall and was built in the 1830s. The day we were there, May 13, 2005, was really windy, cloudy, and downright cold— kind of like the weather we're having today in Saint-Aignan.



The slideshow is made up of a set of photos in the order in which I took them. In one photo, you can see Barfleur on the horizon across the water. In another there's the lighthouse guard dog staring us down. In others are tide pools and views of the rocky coast. It was so cold and windy that we were too frigorifiés to stop and take photos in Barfleur that day. I had been there 6 or 8 months earlier, so we just continued south after a quick drive around the harbor.

I'm late posting this morning because I got too involved in organizing and editing photos. And then I remembered that I needed to cook some black beans for today's lunch, so getting them going slowed me down even more. In all of yesterday's excitement — the neighbors had a huge party that we were invited to, and then there was the men's final at Roland Garros to watch — today's food plans were almost forgotten. We'll be making burritos.

Osso-bucco de veau

The supermarket had what they call osso-bucco de veau — slices of veal shank — on sale for 9.90€ per kilogram this past week — that's only $4.50/lb. I couldn't get over there to buy some until Friday, and of course, despite huge signs advertising the product, there were no veal shanks to be found. As you can see, however, they did have veal shanks on display, but in bulk in the cut-to-order glass case instead of in self-serve plastic-wrapped trays. And they were priced at 15.60€/kg.

The man I assume to be the manager of the meat department happened to be out front, not behind the glass case, having a conversation with another shopper. I waited around, browsing through the other meats in the refrigerated cases, until the conversation ended. As the butcher walked by, my shouted Bonjour, monsieur ! got his attention. I asked him if he had any veal shanks at the lower price. Seeming not to have heard me on the price question, he pointed out the more expensive veal shanks in the display case.

Oui, mais c'est beaucoup plus cher, I told him. I'm kind of used to this happening, since I've been shopping in the local supermarkets for 16 years now. Oh, okay, I'll give them to you at the sale price, he said. I was flabbergasted. How many do you want? Four, I said. He weighed out four shank slices, looked at me, and asked if that would be enough. There are just two of us, I told him, so we'll have leftovers with just those four.

With osso bucco, he said, plus c'est réchauffé, meilleur c'est — veal shank benefits from being re-heated. I agree with that. To make osso-bucco, first I browned the slices of veal in duck fat (butter or olive oil would also be good). As they browned, I diced up a big carrot, an onion, and two celery stalks. I took the veal out of the pan and lightly browned the diced vegetables. I deglazed the pan with white wine and a secret ingredient: a splash of Triple Sec (a liqueur flavored with dried orange peels).

Then I put the veal back into the pan and added enough tomates concassées (crushed tomatoes, out of a can) to cover the meat, along with 2 bay leaves and some thyme, salt, and pepper. I also put in big spoonful of powdered veal stock, which contains some potato starch that thickens the tomato sauce. The veal and vegetables cooked on very low heat for 3 hours, covered. We served the osso-bucco with potato gnocchi, which seem suddenly to be widely available these days.

From Carteret to Barfleur

About 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Carteret, which I've been blogging about for a few days, is the village of Barfleur (pop. approx. 600). It's on the opposite coast from Barneville-Carteret. Barfleur is officially one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France. It's built around a beautiful harbor.

Here's a map:

As you can see, this area of Normandy, historically called le Cotentin and administratively le département de la Manche (la Manche  or "the sleeve" being the French name for what we call the English Channel), is a peninsula that juts out into the sea and is the western part of Normandy. The largest town in the area is Cherbourg, where ocean liners dock.

Above is a stitched-together panorama of the north shore of the Barfleur harbor. I took this set of photos in September 2004, the first time I ever visited the village. You can enlarge the image and scroll across it to see it at full size. Barfleur is famous as the port from which William the Conqueror, who was the Duke of Normandy, sailed to England in 1066. Richard Cœur de Lion (Richard the Lion-Heart) also sailed out of Barfleur when left France to take the throne of England.

Carteret beaches and scenes

This slideshow is made up of photos that I took on a clear, windy day in May 2005 at Carteret on the western Normandy coast. It is made up of 16 photos and takes 1m20s to view.

The show starts at the now disaffected train station. It shows Carteret's two churches, the post office, and the dog we lived with at the time. Collette was with us from 1992 until 2006, and she made the move from California at the age of 11. She always loved going to run at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and she enjoyed the broad sandy beaches at Carteret too.

The channel and boat basin at Carteret in Normandy

Our internet connection just came back from the dead, so I probably should post this as quickly as I can. I was in the middle of putting the post together when I realized I couldn't save it to Blogger. No internet connection. I tried an Android tablet, but the result was the same. Then it occurred me to check the telephone. No dial tone. Now it has all come back, but it's as slow as molasses running uphill.

Here are a few more May 2005 photos that I took on a trip up to Carteret in Normandy. The tide was really low (marée basse, or basse mer). The pattern in the mud or sand is pretty, as you'll see in the next couple of photos.

My friend Ginny in California, who grew up on what we call "the Jersey Shore" — the coast of New Jersey — recently left a comment about what it would be like to have such extreme differences between low tide and high tide. In New Jersey — note that it was Carterets, whose home was the Isle of Jersey, who named the 9state New Jersey back in the 1600s — the tides are about as they are in my native North Carolina, with a difference between mean low tide and mean high tide of only four to six feet.

This morning, before our internet conked out, I was reading a web page about the port at Carteret in France. It's called le port des Îles, because the islands of Jersey and Guernesey are just off the coast. I learned that the channel leading to the harbor at Carteret is open to boats for about 2½ hours before high tide until about 2½ hours after high tide (pleine mer). There's a published schedule. Today, for example, the port opens to boat traffic at about 7:30 a.m. and remains open until about 12:30 p.m. This evening it will be open from about 8:00 p.m. until about 1:00 a.m.

Here again is the channel leading into the boat basin at Carteret taken when the tide was higher (I took it in June 2004) You can see that it was a beautiful day. As I said, the difference in water level between high and low tide on this part of the Normandy coast is 25 to 35 feet, depending on the moon and the weather. Strong westerly winds can also push water up into the channel at Carteret.

And here it is again at low tide. This is what people on boats see as they navigate the channel up to the boat basin. By the way, there is also a town in New Jersey, USA, named Carteret (pop. 24,000). I've never been there, but I have been close. I don't know if it is as picturesque as the Normandy town of Carteret.

The good news right now is that our internet connection seems to be running normally again. I'm always so relieved when it comes back after just a short outage, and I don't have to call the phone company to ask what is going on and when it will be fixed. Anyway, this morning the phone was out too. But I could have called on a cell phone. I didn't have to.

Carteret : marée basse, marée haute

The village of Carteret, in western Normandy, is now part of a bigger town. It merged with the town of Barneville in 1965 to create a new municipality called Barneville-Carteret. This is a photo I took from in front of a hotel in Barneville where I stayed with my mother and her sister in September 2004. I wanted them to see Carteret, since both of them had lived since 1936 in Carteret County, North Carolina, in the U.S. — which is where my grandmother was born.

In the photo above you can see how wide the beaches at Barneville-Carteret are at low tide. The old village of Carteret was built on a rocky promontory that is called le Cap de Carteret. (There is a town in N.C. called Cape Carteret, founded in 1959.) In N.C., Carteret is pronounced [KAR-tuh-rit]; in France it's [kar-tuh-RAY], or [kar-TRAY].

When I was in Carteret in Normandy in June 2004, I saw the channel that leads to the port when the tide was sort of medium high. The water was very blue, and small boats were coming and going. I took the photo above looking westward toward the sea. By the way, the Carteret family originated on the Isle of Jersey, 15 miles off the Normandy coast, more than a thousand years ago.

I must have taken this photo of the channel and waterfront at Carteret from up near the lighthouse, which stands on the promontory you see if the first photo above, overlooking the sea. You can see how low the tide was. This was in May 2005, and I was looking eastward (inland).

Here's a photo of the phare de Carteret that I took in September 2004. The lighthouse is only 18 meters (59 ft.) tall, but it stands on high ground and the total elevation above sea level is 85 meters (275 ft.)

Compare the French Carteret lighthouse above to the lighthouse at Cape Lookout in Carteret County, North Carolina. The Lookout light is built on sand, basically at sea level, and stands 163 feet (about 50 meters) tall.

Marée basse à Portbail en Normandie

Sometimes I really miss living on the coast. I grew up on the North Carolina coast, and our house was a short walk from the shore and less than two miles from the ocean. We could hear the sound of surf pounding along the beach at night, when the ocean waters were rough. And we could smell low tide (marée basse in French) — it was a fishy, seaweed smell.

You won't smell that when you look at this slideshow made up of photos I took at Portbail, in Normandy, but you'll see the evidence. It runs for less than a minute.

Depending on the cycles of the moon, the difference in water level between high and low tide at Portbail, 50 miles north of the Mont Saint-Michel and 15 miles east of the Isle of Jersey, can be about 30 feet (nine or ten meters). I think I'm reading that right on this web page.

On a very low tide at Portbail and other ports along the Normandy coast, all the boats are left sitting on the muddy bottom of the bay. Meanwhile, if I'm reading this web page correctly, the difference between high and low tide in Morehead City, N.C., where I came from, is only about four feet. Oh, there's also an ancient fortified church at Portbail...

Normandie : villages, villes, églises

I recently started thinking about Normandy again because a friend who owned a house up there passed away last week. She was 94, and the house is in the village called Carteret. I first went there in 1992, before I knew that's where her Normandy house was located. Then I spent time there with my friend CHM in 1998.

In May 2005 Walt and I drove up there and  I took this photo of the "old" abbey church in Lessay, not far south of Carteret. Built in the time of William the Conqueror, it survived the French Revolution but was blown up by German troops in 1944. It was rebuilt in the years after the war. It's said to be a faithful restoration.

Old Rouen

Then yesterday it dawned on me that June 2 was the anniversary of the day we arrived in France in 2003. We had bought our house in Saint-Aignan, but it wasn't furnished yet. We were waiting for our container to arrive from California. The first place we went on arrival was Normandy — Rouen, to be precise, in eastern Normandy — where I lived and worked in 1972-73. I still had friends there and they let us stay with them for a few days to get over jet lag before driving down to Saint-Aignan to get our household set up here.

Here are a few photos that I took on June 4, 2003, in Rouen. We had arrived to find the city in the grips of a heat wave. It was beautiful, with bright blue skies that Normandy is not really famous for. Rouen is a very old city with three grand churches in it. One of them is the cathedral that the impressionist painter Claude Monet so famously painted many times in different seasons.

Another grand church in Rouen is called Saint-Ouen. I lived a few minutes' walk from this church back in 1972-73, and I worked in a lycée (high school) just a few meters up the street from here. Funny, when I think back on that time I remember gray skies and constant rain, so it was fun to see it again when the weather was so beautiful.

One of the most famous landmarks in Rouen is this old clock called Le Gros-Horloge. A pedestrian street runs under it through an archway. The old marketplace and the cathedral are just steps away.

This photo shows it from a little farther away. I must have walked under it hundreds of times over the years, because I kept going back to Rouen regularly all through the decades after my year there in the early '70s.

Of roses and rainfall

We don't have a ton of roses in our yard, but the few we do have can be really pretty — especially these pale pink roses. All these are on a single rose bush that grows in the middle of a big patch of white daisies. It just comes back and flowers all by itself every year.

It was hot yesterday, and it's supposed to be even hotter today. Accuweather says to expect an afternoon high of 88ºF (31ºC). Météociel, the other internet weather service we watch, is more conservative — it says to expect a high of 27ºC. That's only 80ºF.

Our gardening focus is vegetables, not flowers. Meanwhile, Accuweather says not to expect a high temperature above 78ºC for the rest of the month of June. And to expect quite a bit of rain — 125 mm, which is nearly 5 inches and 2½ times the monthly average. I'm writing this down so that I can check and see how "accu" Accuweather has been when the end of the month rolls around.

Meanwhile, all this talk of cool, rainy weather is keeping Normandy on my mind. The people in charge of gardening at this house in Normandy when I took the photo in June 2004 were obviously focused on growing flowers. It had just stopped raining that day — temporarily.

Nos pivoines de 2019

Before they're all gone, I thought this year's peonies (pivoines in French) needed to be documented. The petals are falling heavily now.

I took the photo above before the gravel and grass under the plant were covered in peony petals. The close-up photos of individual flowers are some I took three or four days ago. This is one plant we have. There's one other, but I haven't taken pictures of that one.

Suddenly it's summer here, but I don't think it's supposed to last very long. It's supposed to be downright hot today and tomorrow, but much cooler and rainy next week. Rain will finish the peonies but will be good for the vegetable garden, which Walt has been planting for a couple of days now.

Yesterday I had to drive up to Blois for a doctor's appointment. Except in Saint-Aignan, traffic wasn't bad. At 9 a.m., the main road along the river in Saint-Aignan was blocked off by a squadron of gendarmes to let people coming in from the north, across the town's bridge, and heading toward the Beauval zoo south of town, to move through unimpeded. I had to drive a loop through town to get back to the bridge from the other direction.

It takes about 40 minutes to drive up to Blois, and 40 minutes to drive back, when traffic is light. Coming home late on a Friday morning, I wanted to avoid passing through the town of Contres, because Friday is market day there and it gets congested. I took narrow, winding back roads that I'm familiar with, but I found the route barricaded at Oisly — because of road work, I assume. I had to change course and it took me forever to get home. This is a holiday weekend, by the way, and with the fine weather a lot of people are on the roads.

Back to Normandy

Looking at photos I took when I made three separate trips to Normandy in 2004 and 2005 has made me want to go back there again. I'm talking about the part of Normandy called the Cotentin (département de la Manche), which includes the Mont Saint-Michel and the big port city of Cherbourg. That was before I started this blog, and I want to post some photos from back then.

The last time I went to the Mont Saint-Michel was in 2007. I went there twice that year, once on a trip with Walt to celebrate my birthday, and the second time with my sister and a friend of ours who were visiting us in Saint-Aignan and really wanted to see the Mont. I took the photo above, however, in September 2004. I don't think I've ever posted it before.

Cows are emblematic of Normandy. It's milk, cream, and cheese country. I took this photo of a friendly, curious Normandy cow in May 2005, when Walt and I drove up there for a short stay. I wanted to see Carteret one more time, and I wanted to see the picturesque fishing port called Barfleur. We also went to Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue to eat some of that town's famous oysters. I don't think I've been back to Carteret since then.

In 2004, I drove past the town of Coutances, which is famous for its cathedral. I just stopped on the side of the highway and took some pictures of the town off in the distance. I was on my way to Carteret to see J.L., who passed away this week, and CHM, who was visiting her with his partner Frank.

I had been to Coutances and the Mont Saint-Michel back in 1972 or '73, when I was spending a year in Normandy as an assistant d'anglais in a high school, the Lycée Corneille in Rouen. Rouen, the capital of Normandy, is not in this part of the province, but farther east, on the Seine between Paris and Le Havre. But I traveled around some with friends while I was there. And Walt and I did a car trip to many of these places back in 1992.

In 2005, on the trip Walt and I took to Normandy, we actually went into Coutances, where I took this photo of the cathedral. It dates back to the 13th century. Coutances (pop. 9,000 or so) was bombarded and almost completely destroyed during World War II, but somehow the cathedral was spared. Anyway, I think it's getting to be time for a return to Normandy.

CHM, J.L., and how we all met

It was the autumn of 1982. I had decided that year that it was time for me to go home. Back to the U.S., I mean. I had been living in Paris for three years, working part-time as a teacher and as the resident director of a small American college's study abroad program in Paris. I was 33 years old and I was starting to think I needed to find a "real" job, start a career, and start paying into a retirement system so that I'd have something to live on when I got older.

The harbor and small port town of Carteret, in Normandy, where J.L owned a house.

I had always thought I would like to live in Washington DC. I had friends there, and had spent time there with them. Chicago was tempting too — I had spent five years as a graduate student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, teaching and working toward my PhD in French linguistics. But Washington had a more international feel than Chicago, not to mention a milder climate. It was also much closer to North Carolina, where I was born, had grown up, and gone to college. My whole family lived in North Carolina.

I wasn't sure what kind of career I might manage to create for myself. In August 1982, I rented a apartment in Arlington, Virginia, and set about looking for opportunities. After having spent six or seven years of my life living and working in France, I hoped I could find a job that would involve French language skills. Walt and I had become friends in Paris, and soon he moved to Washington too.

From the beach in Carteret, and in this photo, you can see the Isle of Jersey on the horizon.

Sometime in October, an old North Carolina friend of mine who had been living and working in DC for about 10 years phoned me and said she had just seen an ad in the Washington Post for a French-language translator position. She and I had studied French together and even spent six months on a study abroad program in Aix en Provence in 1970. You should apply, she told me. So I did.

The person who was trying to hire a translator was, it turned out, CHM's old friend J.L., the head of the French translation unit at the U.S. Information Agency. CHM had been living in the DC area for nearly 15 years, having moved there from Paris at about the same time I first came to France as a student. He was working as a translator at USIA too. J.L. and her husband, who was a childhood friend of CHM's, had been living and working in DC for 30 years or so. I didn't know either of them at that point, of course. I'm writing this because CHM told me yesterday that J.L passed away this week.

In 1982, there was a test to take for that translation job. J.L. gave me an American news article to translate, put me in a quiet room, and let me have a go at it. That was that. Weeks went by and I heard nothing. I'm not even sure I actually met J.L in person during that time; somebody else administered the test, I think. Time was passing, and Christmas was coming. I was still unemployed, but Walt had found a job.

I stayed in this hotel/restaurant Carteret in 2004, and again with Walt in 2005.

One day between Christmas and New Year's Day, I was at home in my apartment when the phone rang. It was a Frenchman named CHM calling, out of the blue. He explained to me that his friend and colleague J.L. had asked him to take a look at a translation I had done as part of a job application and to give her his opinion of my skills. He asked me to come to the USIA offices on Pennsylvania Avenue and talk to him about a position he himself was trying to fill.

I did so in January 1983. CHM was the editor of the French-language edition of magazine that USIA published for distribution in Africa. CHM's assistant editor, a Frenchwoman, had retired and gone off to live in — guess where — North Carolina. CHM needed a new assistant, and he asked me to come work with him as a contractor, on a trial basis. If it worked out, he would try to get me hired on a permanent basis, either as an editorial assistant or as his assistant editor.

Well, it obviously worked out. I was hired as a translator, though I actually never really translated anything. CHM farmed out English-language texts to various francophone translators around the DC area, and then we turned the draft translations into publishable material by comparing them to the original English texts and making sure they were accurate. My French was good enough for me to be able to tell CHM when I thought the French translation was off the mark, not conveying the meaning of the English original. We would spend hours trying to figure out how to re-word and polish up the translations. Plus, we had all the work of entering the French texts into the computer, formatting them, and proof-reading, which I could also help with.

After about two years, everything changed again. USIA decided to move the magazine's editorial offices to Paris — but not us. I was transferred to the agency's press service for African affairs, where I worked not as a translator but as a reporter, writer, and editor. J.L., whom of course I had met by then, was still the head of the service's translation section. I think she and her translators were happy to have on staff an American who spoke and wrote pretty good French and could help them with language and translation questions.

I was enjoying my new "career" — it turned out that J.L. had never actually been authorized to hire a translator back in 1982 when I was a candidate. It was just luck that CHM had been consulting with her during the hiring process and happened to need somebody with my skills to join his staff. Le hasard fait parfois bien les choses...

In 1986, Walt and I moved to California. That's another long story. I started over again, searching for another career. I ended up working as an editor and manager of a computer magazine, and then moved to work as an editor and manager in a series of software companies. CHM and I stayed in touch, partly because he had California connections too and frequently came to the U.S. West Coast for vacations.

In January 1992, Walt and I came to France to spend some time in Paris, Normandy, and Brittany. We drove up to Cherbourg because I wanted to go see the nearby town of Carteret. The reason for that had to do with historical connections — I was born and raised in Carteret County, North Carolina, and vaguely knew how it had come to be named after a town in France. That year, CHM came to Paris while we were there, and I told him about our Normandy excursion.

Wow, he said, that's a coincidence. Our friend J.L. owns a house in Carteret. It was her grandparents' house, and she spends her summer vacations there. Years later, after CHM had retired from his position at USIA — he had become the head French translator there when J.L. retired — and he started visiting J.L. in Carteret during his summers in France. In 1998, I flew to Paris and drove up there and spent a few days with CHM and J.L., touring around the area. I went back to Carteret several times after Walt and I moved to France in 2003, and I also saw J.L. in Paris many times over the years.

I'm including a few photos I took in Carteret in 2004, before I started blogging. R.I.P., J.L.

J.L.'s house in Carteret, where she spent many summers

Pick me! Pick me!

The verb in my title is slightly ambiguous. It could mean choisis-moi ! Or it might mean cueille-moi ! As in, quoting a well-known local figure, Ronsard : « Cueillez dès aujourd'hui les blettes de la vie ! » All I'm trying to say is that I really have to go pick some more chard leaves. They are too pretty to resist.

Yesterday I baked chard into a dish of lasagne. (My spell checker tells me that lasagne is an error, but I don't think so. It's the plural of lasagna in Italian, I think, and it's the form of the word used in French — des lasagnes — for what we usually call lasagna.) I cooked the chard first, and then I drained it and mixed it into a sort of paste of cream cheese (fromage à tartiner), crème fraîche (cultured French cream), and grated Emmental, with spices like nutmeg, allspice, hot paprika, garlic powder, onions powder, and black pepper.

I used that mixture to make layers, along with tomato sauce and lasagne (lasagna noodles). I also put in one layer of sauteed mushrooms and smoked pork lardons (bacon), and some grated cheese to melt on top. It was pretty good, if I do say so myself. Above is a photo of half of it — we ate the other half. Below is a close-up of the layers.

So now I have to go out one more time and pick as many of the pretty blette leaves as I can, before I finally pull the chard plants out of the ground. We've done other things with chard leaves. Pesto, for example, the way you'd make pesto with basil leaves or radish leaves. And I want to make a savory Auvergne-style pounti cake with chard leaves sometime soon.