Having grown up mostly in suburbs and then spending my early adulthood in cities, I was not exposed to much in the way of livestock (I did live for a very short time in a country house next to a farm with cows). Oh, there were zoos, game farms, and the wild animal park outside San Diego to remind me that wild animals did, in fact, exist. To me, farm animals were almost as exotic. I guess that's why I would stop and take pictures of the livestock on small farms in France. These aren't huge industrial scale stockyards, but mostly family farms that raise cows, goats, poultry, pigs, or, in this case, a few sheep.
I saw these sheep just outside of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, a place that's not far from where we live now. But in 1989 when I took this picture, it felt a world away from my urban life in San Francisco.
Like you, I found farm animals exotic, too. Spanish sheep say “bee.” What do French sheep say?
ReplyDeleteThis is a view my mother and I might have had when we took long strols around St-Savin where we stayed for a few months in 1940. Memories!
ReplyDeleteSt-Savin is also the birthplace of Léon Édoux the inventeur of the ascenseur. He owned the Abbott’s House, part of the abbey known as the French Sistine Chapel.
It's great to have those memories, chm, and thanks for the interesting tidbit about Léon Édoux!
DeleteThank you, Judy. Léon Édoux was a friend of my father’s. My parents, and their two children, spent many a summer at the “Château”, as the abbot’s house was known. The last time I was there as a young one, I was eighteen months old, so I have no recollection, though later I met his widow with my mother in her enormous appartment in Paris. By 1940, both Édoux had died and the Château was in other hands. They had no children.
DeleteWell, Édoux was also a friend of Gustave Eiffel, and he his the one who invented and created the ascenseurs, a word he coined, for the Tour, probably hydraulic at the time. Interesting people. Well, my father was known internationally in the medical field.
Deletemitch, they say "Bonjour."
ReplyDeletechm, :)