Homesick

Dear Montecito,

I am writing you from a London Heathrow flight bound to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. From there I will transfer to Dallas Fort Worth before finally touching down in Santa Barbara where I haven’t been for 13 months. Stay off the roads tonight, people – I’m going straight to Super-Rica Taqueria.

I have taken two weeks’ time off work to see family, get some vitamin D that doesn’t come in a packet, and of course eat tacos. In preparation for this break, I did the regular tidying up. I cleaned my apartment so it would be nice when I got back. I made myself a document at work summarizing where all my projects were, and what I anticipated as next steps. And I reviewed my Dear Montecito interviews so that my publishing schedule would be sorted for the next month.

As I read over my conversations with different Santa Barbara alumni, I saw something interesting.

Let’s take a tension-building segue before I get to my point. Because I talk about it whenever I get the opportunity, you may know that I am interested in human psychology. Growing up, I think I saw it a bit as detective work. What can you tell about someone’s internal life from their behavior? In recent years, I’ve started to turn this question inward. Which may seem, well, redundant. Certainly, I know my own internal life. Why would I need to make guesses about it based on my behavior?

When I interview people for this column, I tend to mix in pre-planned questions with ones that occur to me while we’re talking. There are always some things I know I want to ask about – but after we have been chatting for a while, there are new topics on which I want the interviewee’s thoughts. Lately, the same question has been showing up in the impromptu category:

What do you miss since leaving home?

So yes, my segue earlier was to hint that this question was an example of me projecting on other people. I didn’t realize I had asked this question to so many different interviewees. I didn’t notice how much I was thinking about home until I saw it written in a Word document.

The cure is a trip home. But with ten more hours of travel ahead of me and a willing audience who can understand what I mean, I would like to get some of these thoughts out of my system. As such, here is an inexhaustive list of the things I love and miss about Santa Barbara: Shoestring onion rings from Lucky’s, the fountain that was taken out of the Pierre LaFond courtyard, sunlight, the smell of red brick, people who make scrunchy faces after having a wheatgrass shot at the Farmers Market, my family, driving through Summerland, Halloween, apple pie, the Ventura County Fair, fresh papaya, airborne vanilla powder at the Coast Village Road Coffee Bean, the Coast Village Road Coffee Bean, lavender bushes, eating popsicles after jog-a-thon, getting several life-long California residents to squeeze-guess the ripeness of an avocado, pealing eucalyptus bark, late afternoon walks on Butterfly Beach, and grumbling about developments in Paseo Nuevo. 

There you have it. A garden variety case of homesickness. And I’m barreling toward the remedy from 30,000 ft. See you soon.  

Yours,

Stella