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.