I usually keep The Liquid Muse blog posts booze-focused. However, I am proud to share some of my non-cocktail writing that was recently acknowledged as the 2nd place winner in the Santa Fe Reporter Writing Contest, Personal Essay category. I grew up in Santa Fe, NM, and went on to live in several big cities, a few countries and travel rather extensively. Finally, I decided to come home to settle, and refocus on some lifelong goals, one of which is devoting more time to creative writing. The theme for this contest was "Santa Fe Nights" so I wove that topic throughout my account of watching Santa Fe change over the years - for better and worse - and some observations and feelings as I settle back into my hometown.-----The first time I heard the word “gringa,” I was 4. It was hurled at my mom, sister and me as we walked up Galisteo Street, in 1974. My parents had just opened their Indian trading post, down the block, which would support our family for the next several decades. In sharp contrast to the “get out of here” tone coming from the passenger side of the low-rider, my young eyes were taking in the most welcoming sunset I’d ever seen… the entire contents of a Crayola box rubbed onto the horizon, just before it went dark. That’s my first recollection of many Santa Fe nights to come.A certain level of resentment toward outsiders is understandable, considering Santa Fe’s bloody history. From the 1600’s, Conquistadors snatched land from indigenous people before the Spanish assimilated into the genealogical landscape. Later, settlers wandered across the Wild West, and the blended peoples here became Las Tres Gentes –Native American, Hispanic (Spanish and Mexican), and Anglo, with the latter being the minority. So, our blond hair, my immigrant parents’ European accents, and our non-Hispanic family name did, I guess, make us gringos, in the Santa Fe usage of the term.I’m grateful I didn’t grow up in a vanilla-flavored American city. Childhood, here, meant bouncing along in the back of my dad’s old pick-up truck to throw popcorn at Melodrama villains when Madrid was still a ghost town. We pulled a red wagon showing off our reluctant cats in the Fiesta Pet Parade, spent sun-drenched afternoons catching horny toads in the arroyos, and trapped shiny, black stinkbugs in glass jars. We molded pots from clay earth, made “forts” within juniper trees’ evergreen branches, and plucked fossils from tilled dirt roads near construction sites as more houses slowly dotted the hills behind ours. Our mom bought tiles and bricks with our names printed on them, benefiting the downtown library and Cross of the Martyrs, so we could have tangible proof of “roots,” somewhere. And, I especially treasured being included in warm celebrations by friends with big families and abuelas whom I also got to call “grandma.”Santa Fe nights, as a child, meant roasting bubbling marshmallows on a stick in the adobe horno on our patio while delighting in Zozobra’s fiery moans from the bottom of the mountain, and a birds-eye view of the fireworks that ensued. The crisp evening air was perfumed with the distinctive aroma of burning pinon logs. Crickets sang us softly to sleep, and roaming coyotes startled us awake as they “yip-yip-yipped” across unfenced acres, at times dragging away the unluckiest neighborhood cat. My dad pointing out a translucent “ice ring” around the full moon, one sparkly winter night, remains fondly in my memories of the first time we caught snowflakes on our tongues. Sometimes, tucked warmly in bed, the black silence seemed as if it could swallow up the world.In the ‘80s, Santa Fe nights included school activities, doing community theater, and a mish-mash of teenagers (skaters, hippies, drop-outs, preppies) gathering on the plaza. It was not blocked off from traffic, then, so cars could circle around it. No longer an outsider, I joined others in shouting “go home!” at drivers with out-of-state license plates, without considering that tourism is Santa Fe’s main industry, and paid my own school tuition. Sometimes those nights ended with a house party but we’d often wind up out by the city dump, before Las Campanas golf course existed, to swig whiskey around bonfires, under New Mexico’s starry skies, dreaming of a big life outside a small town.After UNM, I joined the millions chasing celluloid dreams, and moved to Venice Beach which, in the ‘90s, reminded me of home with its mash-up of cultures. The Virgen de Guadalupe dangled from my gold belly button ring, a proud symbol of my hometown’s culture, and wink-and-nod to my Catholic school upbringing through the wild nights of my roaring 20s. Still, I always looked forward to coming home for the most famous Santa Fe Night of all - Christmas Eve - caroling around blazing fires along gallery-lined Canyon Road, followed by steaming bowls of posole and homemade batches of sugary biscochitos.Just like back home, shortly after the millennium ticked over in Venice, rising real estate “values” pushed locals out, so gangster rap was replaced with “trustafarians” and business suits snapping up million-dollar cottages. And, eventually, the shimmering stars that drew me to L.A. lost their brilliance so I took flight to Spain for a few years, followed by Washington DC, another stint in LA, and work travel took me around the world blogging, writing magazine articles and three recipe books. Finally, exactly 40 years after my family first arrived in New Mexico, I settled down back in my hometown of Santa Fe, inwardly worried whether Thomas Wolfe’s title was right in suggesting, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”Well, he was partially right. During my time away, our family home sold to a gringo couple who immediately remodeled and flipped it for beaucoup bucks. There was a pang of loss to think that decades of our family’s sentimental joys and devastating pains that took place within those walls were blown away in builders’ dust and a modern, granite-and-slate version of “Santa Fe Style.” Nearly the whole neighborhood has been flipped by now, and most dirt roads are paved over to accommodate fancier cars.Regularly ranked on Top Ten travel lists, droves of visitors descend upon The City Different. The tourist-driven summer night fun lures some folks to stay permanently. Many newer residents fit right in because they love what this town is about, like our family did. Some even give a shot-in-the-arm to our wanting nightlife by creating film festivals, yoga jams, under-21 events, and Plaza Bandstand boogies. It’s nice that the rebuilt SF Opera house roof no longer requires the middle part of the audience to pack umbrellas in case the world-class orchestra collides with late-summer evening thunderstorms. More famous chefs, authors, artists and actors call Santa Fe home - or at least, “second home” - which helps drive tourism, and makes our town more interesting.However, since returning, I’ve also noticed more of an economic divide in this small city. So, when the well-off out-of-staters wax poetic about moving here, drawn to all that makes it unique, the 16-year-old rebel in me rolls her eyes. Local people get pushed further out toward the city limits, and escalating rents drive small businesses out of downtown. (Do low-riders even cruise those high-priced streets, anymore?) A few teens may ramble across the plaza at night, from time to time, but it’s no longer the late-night heartbeat of young chatter, music, cars and laughter. Meanwhile, the cost of living is rising in this now resort-style haven forcing people with everyday jobs to bust butt just to sleep well at night, surviving paycheck-to-paycheck. The population’s high turnover reflects the unforeseen challenges of having to work three part-time jobs, and the lonely disillusionment for singles when the social scene takes a dive in winter.What makes Santa Fe Nights special, to me, these days, is spending time with my parents, now in their 70s. I value my tight circle of friends, here – lifelong ones and new arrivals – who enjoy dinner parties, watching sports at a bar or busting out Cards Against Humanity. A sunset hike or occasional candlelit, live-music yoga class at the Railyard is a treat. When Sean Healen rocks the Cowgirl, or Alex Maryol has a gig, I’m often clapping along in the audience because they are not only very talented musicians but part of my local peer group. Or, I might sit in front of my own crackling fireplace and delve into writing projects which I’ve left on the dusty shelves of my mind for too long. Returning to Santa Fe, at this point in my life, I also have a deeper appreciation of what is so fiercely protected from the outside world: the quiet space, living alongside nature rather than tearing into it, centuries-old traditions rooted in spirituality, creative energy pulsing around us, and the ghosts of centuries-past keeping watch over their homeland where brujas and angels exist side-by-side. The yin and yang of God.Nightly, I settle onto the deck in my now-trendy neighborhood (or as we old-timers would reference the area: “by where the old bowling alley used-to-be”) gazing up at peaceful stars winking down from the big black silence, searching for ice rings and strangely comforted by the occasional distant “yip” of a wild coyote coming too close to town. Eventually, I head in to my cozy bed and drift off to a lullaby of whispering pine needles, on windy nights. When I wake up, I will still be a gringa with my own proud place in Santa Fe’s layers of culture, maybe for the next 40 years, si Dios lo quiere...