Loving California (Home)
Love of place, of home. A universal source and taproot of humanity now becoming universally cut off by our increasingly rootless culture, the temporary holding-pens now euphemistically labeled as “homes” substituting no more for real homes than the word substitutes for the thing.
I am one of the blessed few who were lucky enough to grow up with a home really worth loving and really worth the name. So worth loving, in fact, that those few acres and the surrounding square kilometer or so of hills, creek, and village were more than adequate to keep me entertained, maybe even enthralled, at least until I started college. and it was only after graduating that my notion of home—and my love for it—begin to expand beyond home place and home town to home region and home world. It was also then that I experienced the shock and grief of losing those few acres that had first kindled my love of homeplace-as-world and world-as-homeplace, lost to the economic machine that eats real homes and turns them into what it calls homes but is really only clutter.
Our place was the first in our valley to go the way that most of the finest parts of California have now gone. My grandfather liked to call our little farm “the prettiest place in Soquel.” Everywhere it seemed like the “prettiest places” were the first to go. Now the home-eating “home”-making machine is getting down to the dregs of what is left, but making its “homes” bigger and closer together . . . like an addict: bigger fixes, closer together, until nothing works any more and the money is gone.
So . . . kicking and screaming into conservation.
To give an idea . . . [describe home in 50s]. Not typical idea of life in 50s—Levittown or sitcom—but . . .
- Main St.—creek bottom (and flood and fishing)—cherry orchard, plums, labyrinth of barns, chicken houses, corral, garages, etc. below house and tank house above, with four giant walnuts, knoll/terrace with pasture, old apple trees, vegetable gardens, baseball field for Wayne, Carpignano Hill, neighbors and mystery, occasional sheep, pigs, cows, turkeys, ducks, mostly chickens (smell of abandoned chicken houses). Seasons, birds. Up road to grandparents’ orchards by creek, old rickety house with honeysuckle entry and back stairs and outhouse. Down road past great grandparents’ house to other grandparents and several sets of uncles and aunts, then village and grocery store, and short walk to beach at Capitola but seldom did it, etc. Elementary school with taxi’d (also library). Secondary school in Capitola—walked. SHS—walked. No car necessary. Place in mountains, 1870s, hobbies: birds (through college, taxidermy, garden, later botany, hunting/fishing. Separate story in Valley section
