Sometimes, It's Not Just a House

Thanks for your kind words of understanding and support when I wrote to tell you that my family home survived yet another catastrophe. I know that you meant for me to find comfort in your assurance that my strong emotional attachment to my home is natural, but somehow, I'm not sure you understand my attachment to my home, so I'd like to share a bit of family history with you.

The property has been in my family since the early 1900s, first owned by my grandfather, who was a master woodworker in Santa Barbara and whose work survives in many of the historic buildings in the city. The property was part of the wandering my father did on the weekends as he was locked out of his step-mother's home every day at 7 am and not allowed to return until 7 pm, in time for dinner and bed. My father, who died in 1962, walked every inch of those canyons and hills as a child, finding remnants of the Indians who lived there long before we all showed up. My father built a home for his family, a wife and 5 children, on the piece of land he knew so well. During the building, a 6th child was born, a son named for my father's beloved father, who died shortly after helping my father with the early stages of the building.

My dad built our home from the ground up, and we moved into it in 1954. When we were children, my father took us for walks on the weekends, walks that took us well past the end of Tunnel Road and up to the caves, as well as to La Cumbre peak, from which the view was breathtaking. The Botanical Gardens, Mission Creek, the old tunnel at the end of Tunnel Road, Rattlesnake Canyon, the mountains: those were our playground. I have pictures of Mission Canyon when our home was one of a handful in the area, taken from the corner of Williams Way and Ben Lomand Drive, well before all the development. I remember playing in a wash that ran from above Montrose Place down to Cheltenham, and then all the way down the Canyon, where it emptied into Mission Creek. Of course, all traces of that natural waterway have been filled in and covered with homes. I remember riding on pieces of cardboard down the side of the hill from Ben Lomand Drive to Foothill, nothing there to stop us as we raced across the slick anise weeds. Because my mother didn't drive until we were in junior high school, we walked everywhere we went until we were old enough to ride bikes, cutting down the hillside to Mission Canyon Road and then to the natural history museum, to the public library, to the beach, or across the empty lots to Tunnel Road and into the other canyons and hillsides. I know Mission Canyon from the ground up, so to speak.

My brother walked back into the neighborhood last Wednesday, his birthday, when an elderly neighbor told my brother that he had left without his medications. My brother found the medication and a beloved dog, who was injured by the fire but survived, and made the waiting to see what happens to the neighborhood a little less stressful for one neighbor. Law enforcement challenged my brother's right to be there by telling him that he didn't have authorization, but my brother had something more important: the deed to his family home.

My brother was also there when another neighbor at the end of the block was brought back on Mother's Day to see the remnants of his home by his children, grown adults now, rather than the newborn infants for whom I once babysat. As my brother described the neighborhood after the fire, he identified the homes by their original residents, not the entrepeneurs who bought them to make money off an inflated real estate market. My dad helped build many of these homes in exchange for the neighbor's help with building his home. My brother knows not just the houses, but the people and their stories because he's been there -- all his life.

There have been many times since my family moved into the home that its existence has been threatened, but still it stands. Other neighbors have come and gone, but my family home remains my family home. The vacant lot on the Cheltenham side of the property, at Dorking Place, has never been developed, one of the few vacant properties left in the canyon and still owned by my family.

So yes, I do have a strong emotional attachment to my family home, an attachment that goes back close to a hundred years of family history and four full generations of family memories. There are some of us who see our homes as our history, an attachment that is stronger than comforting words convey.