Falling in Love with Santa Fe

Opening the window in our Santa Fe hotel room that summer, it wasn't the view that captured me, but the scent of the rain on the wind. Suddenly I was weeping; it was a smell from my childhood in Montana that I hadn't experienced since I was 8 years old. It was monsoon season when the cumulus clouds build all day until they gift the high desert with rain in the late afternoon. Watching the high clouds and feeling the soft rain later that day made me love Santa Fe even more than I had before.  

It was my third visit to the town. Jeff, my then boyfriend, now husband, had introduced me to one of his favorite places on my birthday the previous April. Even though he teased that he brought all of his wives and girlfriends to Santa Fe, it was my first time in the city, and I was, as New Mexicans like to say, enchanted. 

Walking around the Plaza on those first few days felt at once familiar and foreign. The big sky, the cottonwoods, the view of the Sangre de Cristos, the southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains, are a distinctly western landscape. But the city itself is not the cowboy west, it is an amalgam of the three cultures that define it—Native, Hispano and Anglo. 

The adobe-cloaked town with its Pueblo Revival architecture appears as a charming stage set that smells of chile. An old fashion bandstand surrounded by wrought iron benches, invites locals and tourists alike to take a seat. The surrounding shops are filled with handcrafted Native jewelry, pots and weavings, the same ones sold by the vendors from the near-by pueblos that spend every day under the portal in front of the Palace of the Governors. Those artisans are the descendants of the original Taonan people who built their village on the site of the current plaza.

The Spanish, who arrived in the 16th century and whose descendants are still among the town's notable families, laid out the city around a central plaza with government buildings to the north and a church that is now the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi on the east—a formal plan that delineates the heart of the Santa Fe to this day. Streets with a mix of Spanish and English names, names that speak to the history of the town, lead away from the Plaza in all directions. San Francisco crosses both Lincoln and Washington and the Old Santa Fe trail ends at the Plaza. 

Wandering those streets on that initial trip, we discovered garden courtyards, museums, art galleries, bookstores and boutiques selling everything you might need to be suitably outfitted, Santa Fe style. Colorful paintings, wearable art, Navajos rugs and buffalo skulls. I coveted everything and could imagine myself living this seductive city.

At night in the restaurants, the clientele was costumed in layers of leather, turquoise and sliver, boots and hats. Obviously they had been shopping, too. We came for the food and enjoyed the show as we sipped our margaritas and pondered the local culinary quandary: red, green or Christmas?

We returned again and again, in every season, and grew to love it more with each trip. Jeff bought a condominium, a vacation home, we thought. By the time we were moving in, I had acquired what I considered to be the essentials for my Santa Fe life—a fringed jacket, Lucchese boots, a custom hat and a good collection of silver and turquoise jewelry. Now, after more than fifteen years as a resident, I realize that most of the people wearing those gorgeous get-ups are from Dallas.