Take me home, semirural roads

Montecito is semirural in the way Donny Osmond was a little bit country. How my home suburb (let’s be honest) came to be described this way I don’t know.

Yes, there are some horses and avocado trees, but inserting the occasional “y’all” in conversation doesn’t mean you’re from East Texas.

When I tell people I’ve moved back to Montecito after 20 years, they often say, “Oh, it must have changed.” But to be honest it hasn’t, and for that I’m glad.

It was wealthy then, and it’s wealthy now, although I miss the beach shack, stow-a-joint-in-your-long-hair contingent. Those guys have gotten priced out, unless they’re clinging on to family property. (Hang in there!)

And, yes, I know the traffic is scarier, as evidenced by the paucity of bicycles in the Montecito Union bike cage. In my day, that’s how we got to school. But try driving around Northern Virginia, Atlanta or Los Angeles for a while during rush hour. If you’re bemoaning the state of Montecito, put your therapy kitty toward traveling around a bit. You’ll feel a lot better.

Like always, people are still self-congratulatory for simply living here, as if weather and topography were some kind of personal achievement.

Just go to the farmers market and see people who have lived here for 40 years greet each other smugly with, “Beautiful day isn’t it?” They could say it 300 days a year, but it’s a line that never grows old.

One of the ways I’d say Montecito is different, though, is in how people talk about and perceive the place: like the use of “semirural” to describe it.

This shift in perception pops up in little ways all the time. When I went to the local bank to set up a checking account this past summer, the manager asked me what city I wanted listed on my checks. Thanks for asking, ma’am, I’ll take Buffalo. No, she explained, some of her clients prefer Montecito to Santa Barbara on their checks—they think it has more cachet. Or maybe it was more cash, eh?

Sitting in the bank, I began to get a feeling for what semirural meant. Think Westchester County or Middleburg, Va., horse country. Montecito has become a little more sophisticated, but this is by no means all bad. My queasiness about moving home was greatly assuaged by spying New York Times bins on the street; they’re pretty pleasing cultural indicators. But believing that Montecito is somehow a cut above Santa Barbara is like bragging about a love affair in Paris rather than Rome.

If you don’t believe me, ask somebody visiting from Des Moines in January. In the past 20 years, I’ve lived in India, Connecticut, Cambodia, London, Peru, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Ah, and now I’m home.

If you didn’t know it already, the worst place in Santa Barbara beats the best anywhere else. OK, that’s specious hyperbole (who’d turn down a flash pad in South Kensington?), but you know what I mean.

Beautiful day, isn’t it?