“You’re from Marin? Ohhhhh.” [Subtext: that explains a lot.]

No, it doesn’t, damn it!

I didn’t think of Marin as anything special when I was a kid. It was just home, you know? Where I lived, & played, & went to school.

After my parents were married in 1935 they settled in Marin, primarily because my father already lived & worked here. Dad was born in Merced in the San Joaquin Valley, but was moved into St. Vincent’s School for Boys, a few miles north of San Rafael, when he was a boy. St. Vincent’s is run by the charitable arm of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, & these days is a residential treatment facility for seriously disturbed boys; but in the 1920s it was more like an orphanage/boarding school. Dad & his brothers weren’t orphans; but their mother was dead, their father couldn’t care for them & work to support them at the same time, so they were sent to live and be educated at St. Vincent’s.

Mom was born in San Jose; she, too, had an untraditional home life. Her parents were divorced when she was very young, & she & her three siblings were divvied up amongst the relatives. Mom went to live with her maternal grandparents; her little sister Evelyn went to her paternal grandparents; her brothers Bill & Harry went to St. Vincent’s. It was when Mom went to visit them there that she first met my father.

After Mom & Dad were married they lived in & around central Marin; out in Fairfax for a while, then way out in Santa Venetia, long before it was developed; eventually built a tiny house on a new street adjoining the farmland north of San Rafael. After they started a family they built a bigger house a few hundred feet farther up the street. It was set in the middle of two lots, with garden all around it: flowers & decorative plantings in the smaller front yard; fruit & nut trees, grape arbor & a huge vegetable garden in back, big enough to supply most of the produce needed to feed a family of eight, all year round. [We called it ‘the back 40.’] This is the house I grew up in, & still occupy.

So where was I? oh yes, Marin, in italics. It is indeed a special place, very beautiful, with redwood forests, farmland, dairies, creeks & hills & beaches, & our spirit guardian Mount Tamalpais looming over the entire county; but there was no particular mystique about it. But then one of the large format magazines (Life or Look or somebody) published an article extolling the sunny, relaxed, marijuana-laced hedonism of life in Marin. Huh? My family all read & enjoyed it mightily; especially hilarious was the author’s statement about our weather: “It’s always May 8th in Marin County.” We got a lot of mileage out of that, because spring in Marin is just about as unpredictable a time, weather-wise, as you can find. But as for the rest of it, whoever wrote the article had evidently talked to a bunch of people the like of which none of us had ever met.

Dad co-owned a garage in San Rafael & was an automotive mechanic by trade, until he sold his share of the garage & went back to St. Vincent’s to work as their facilities manager (& farmhand, when occasion demanded); Mom was a housewife, a job that during her marriage included seamstress to one husband & six rapidly-growing kids, Victory gardener, home food preservation specialist & financial manager, among other things. I went to school with children from more affluent families, but none of my schoolmates’ parents did anything to get snobby about, nor were they conspicuous consumers of anything (at least as far as we knew!). We lived in normal middle-class families too, though one family down the block was regarded as slightly louche because they drove a Citröen. And pot? what’s that?

One of the beautiful things about the neighborhood I call home is that it is still resolutely middle class; older, smaller houses, on larger lots than you see in modern subdivisions, positioned such that they aren’t rubbing elbows with the houses on either side. [Interestingly enough, county zoning designates my neighborhood as Residential Agriculture.] You can still have a decent yard here; a vegetable garden; & a bit of privacy too, unlike those living in new McMansions on tiny lots who are literally looking into each other’s windows. And my neighbors are tradespeople; teachers; gardeners; truck drivers; yes, even a few housewives.

If living in Marin means being a hedonist, then I suppose that’s what we are. We have chosen to live here, after all. But for us, it’s home, pure & simple.

… me being a woman of a certain age, born & raised & living in Marin County, California.

And what prompted me to join the thousands of other bloggers on the Web? I don’t want to say, sheer irritation, but that’s kind of what started it. Irritation with the widespread perception of Marinites as wealthy beyond everyday dreams of wealth; entitled, arrogant, snobbish; conspicuous consumers of everything under the sun. Like every cliché, it’s based on a certain set of facts, but it doesn’t reflect nearly all the facts. The facts being that, despite Marin’s undisputed status as one of the 25 wealthiest counties in the United States, there is a substantial population of real people living a real life, people like me: middle class, working class, whatever you want to call us.

We don’t drive Lamborghinis, Teslas, or even BMWs; our mortgages, if we are still paying one down, are a comfortably low percentage of our take-home pay; our yearly property taxes are nowhere near five figures, let alone six. And we don’t share our space with a housekeeper, personal chef, au pair or even a daily.

We have chickens in the back yard &/or suburban organic farms; we hang our laundry out to dry when there’s sunshine enough, & reluctantly use the dryer when there isn’t; we have a pantry stocked with the fruits (and vegetables) of our labor; we cook our own food, wash our own dishes & maintain our own houses.

We are, if you will, grounded in Marin. And, despite all the misleading national press, proud to say we’re Marin natives. Because we know that the down-to-earth life in Marin — the El Dorado of northern California — is alive & thriving.

This blog is a window into one small piece of real Marin. Welcome.