When a Place Is Also a Way
Hydrangeas. You won’t find a neighborhood in Napa without ‘em.
Grapevines would have been a more obvious choice, but what first got me were the hydrangeas. I didn’t know what they were supposed to like until I moved to Napa, even though I had heard ladies talk about them back in San Antonio. Mostly, I knew hydrangeas were supposed to be a thing of envy: flowers so difficult to grow, any surviving specimen deserved admiration. In south central Texas, these were plants for the elite gardener- or those wealthy enough to pay for an elite gardener.
Then I came to wine country. The room I rented my first harvest here sat in an old neighborhood where front yards were glutted with fat, blue hydrangea blossoms. They looked like fat babies’ fists pounding their periwinkle way into the sky. Had I landed into a hotbed for master gardeners? Or was that elusive Texas hydrangea something entirely different than the ubiquitous flower bunches I saw in front of every other house in my new neighborhood? These were nothing like the scraggly things I had seen in San Antonio. Whatever the case, I had little time to contemplate landscaping; there were grapes to crush and people to meet.
Months after my first foray into Napa, I saw the same voluminous plants lining the front porches in my next temporary home. I bounced through the town of Blenheim, New Zealand, in a rickety pickup truck while the truck’s driver, a vineyard foreman, pointed out landmarks and brought me to the room I’d be renting during harvest. The little river where kids went fishing for eels, walking path to the grocery store, stay away from that block. And hydrangeas again. Everywhere.
By the time I was settling into my “harvest home” on my third continent, a year later, the same landscaping was there to greet me. Hydrangeas are very happy in Chilean soil too, it turns out. Again- grapes would have been a more obvious choice, since crush is what brought me to each place- but it took hydrangeas for me to connect the dots. A trend beyond viticulture made itself evident. Soil types and sun exposure are more than happenstance; they dictate a way of life. You can be halfway across the globe, and still be on familiar ground: the world around you looks a certain way, the air feels a certain way, rhythms follow a particular pattern. One knows to reference the mountains or ocean, or- in the case of one of my home towns- highways or cow pastures. Terrior for humans. A place is more than GPS points; in the best places, a place is also a way.
Though I’ve lived in many places, two ways have been my home. When the perfect song puts a lump in my throat for Texas, I am not longing for a place on a map. It’s the slow, flat sunsets over a hay field. It’s big red and barbacoa, and the chance of thunderstorms in July. It’s hearing cicadas and the crackle of oak while my dad and brother smoke a brisket. It’s even- yes!- the faint smell of horse manure on an evening breeze.
Funny enough, I’ve found a very similar way just an hour from my Napa home. The dramatic hills of Pope Valley are nothing like the wide, flat ranch lands of my childhood home. But there are old, handmade fences to mend. There are dusty roads connecting one house to another. There are more snakes and cows than there are people. It’s a way that feels and smells like the place I still call home, even though I live two time zones away.
And then there’s Napa. People come from far and wide to be a part of our way. We drive through vineyards on the way to school. We eat outside all summer long. This close to harvest, it’s perfectly normal to start a conversation with, “You started yet?” because when we ask that question, we’re asking about work, family, and the weather all-in-one. We’re close enough to the Pacific to refer to things as west or inland, and small enough that north-to-south is either “in town” or “up valley”. We know the month of February is best spent with a stack of books or a handful of movies for the rain days, and a pair of grippy hiking shoes for the days with sun. Wine on a Tuesday night is no big deal. There’s also the hydrangeas.
My husband and I like to joke about uprooting to New Zealand or Italy, which is all the more fun to say because we could. (Except for the part where our kids’ grandparents would have our hides.) It’s not just because winegrowing regions make sense for a career winemaker; there’s a way of living that courses through the land where grapes thrive. Volcanoes and rivers and upheavals of earth have spent millennia pouring what they know into the dirt, and places where grapes grow best are teeming with the same old wisdom. It gently nudges us into a way of living that is at once recognizable to those who have lived it elsewhere.
I was talking with a student this week whose parents brought her from Jalisco, Mexico when she was a baby. “So my dad could get a job, and they could raise me,” she said. I could hardly finish asking if her parents miss their first home, before she gave me an unequivocal Yes. But they can’t… There are enough headlines and soundbites out there to finish her sentence for her. Her parents and I both came to Napa around thirteen years ago; I imagine that they, like me, could have fallen in love with our way of life here- and still also hold dear the way they knew before.
Calling a place home is more than pointing to a spot on a map. It’s a way that we come together, and meaning-making for why we do things, and when. It becomes a shorthand when we’re meeting someone for the first time: “Where you from?” feels much safer than “How do you live?”, but the two questions are branches from the same tree. A place- if we’re lucky- is also a way. Ask the hydrangeas, they’ll tell you.
