Goleta has, for a long time, been called the Good Land. The phrase has stuck because it is true. The valley is fertile. The light is gentle. The hills behind the town hold their grasses well into the summer. The Pacific is one short turn of the head away. And the neighborhoods that have grown up here over the past half-century — the older streets along Hollister, the quiet developments tucked along Cathedral Oaks, the long blocks that run toward the foothills, the small commercial centers where the same dry cleaners has been pressing the same shirts for thirty years — have produced one of the quieter and more comfortable places to grow old in California.
Goleta does not have the architectural drama of Montecito. It does not have the European-village charm of Santa Barbara proper. What it has, more abundantly than its better-known neighbors, is the deep texture of long lives lived in modest grace. The families who came here in the sixties and seventies, often for the university or for the aerospace industry, raised their children here. The children left, mostly, for the larger cities. The parents stayed. They are still here. They are, in many cases, the clients we serve.
The Good Land's Particular Generation
We have a soft spot for the generation we have been privileged to serve in Goleta. They are, very often, couples in their late seventies and eighties who have been married for fifty or sixty years. The wife was, in many cases, a teacher or a nurse. The husband was, in many cases, an engineer at one of the early technology companies, or a researcher at the university, or a contractor who built half the houses in the neighborhood. They worked hard. They saved carefully. They raised competent children. They grew old in the houses they bought when the streets were still being paved.
These are not, generally, ostentatious households. The cars in the driveways are American sedans or Japanese midsize vehicles, well-maintained, kept for fifteen years. The furniture inside is good and has been there a long time. The kitchen is small and orderly. The backyard has a citrus tree, often two — a Meyer lemon and a Valencia orange — and the fruit is still picked, in season, by whoever can still reach.
This is the texture we have come to recognize as Goleta. It is honorable. It is unpretentious. It is, in our considered view, one of the more beautiful manners of aging that any community in California has produced. And it asks of us a particular kind of home care.
What Goleta Households Tend to Need
The needs we encounter in Goleta households are often weighted toward the practical. Help with bathing and dressing, certainly. Help with the medications, which often come in numbers and complexities that a spouse can no longer easily manage. Help with the household tasks that have become harder — the laundry, the bed-changing, the light cleaning. Help with the cooking, particularly when the wife of the household is the one who needs care, and the husband, now in his eighties, has not cooked a meal in fifty years.
We are good at all of this. The work is not glamorous. It is, however, what aging at home actually requires for the majority of older adults — and our caregivers have been trained to do it with the same dignity and the same attention to small detail that we would bring to any household in any neighborhood.
There is also, in Goleta, a particular emphasis on supporting the spouse. Many of our clients here are not single individuals receiving care. They are one half of a long marriage, and the other half is the primary caregiver — and the primary caregiver is, often, the one who needs us most. The eighty-six-year-old husband who has been quietly caring for his wife with advancing dementia for two years. The eighty-two-year-old wife whose husband has had a series of small strokes and now needs more help than she can safely provide.
These spouses are heroes. They are also, very often, exhausted, frightened, and slowly being worn down by work they were never trained for. Our role in these households is, in large part, to lift the weight of caregiving off the spouse — to give him an afternoon to himself, to give her a night of uninterrupted sleep, to do the bathing he has been dreading, to handle the medications she has been losing track of. The relief, when we are doing our work well, is profound. We have had spouses tell us, after some months, that we saved both of their lives. We do not take the phrase lightly. We know what they mean.
The Lemon-Grove Mornings
The mornings in Goleta are, in our view, one of the underrated pleasures of the central coast. The marine layer often holds longer here than it does over Santa Barbara proper. The first hours of the day, in the lemon-grove neighborhoods along the foothills, smell faintly of citrus and damp grass. The mockingbirds are loud. The dove on the wire on the back fence is, somehow, always the same dove, season after season. There is a kind of soft generosity to the morning here that we have learned to honor.
We do not rush the morning in a Goleta household. The clients have, in most cases, been getting up at their own pace for half a century, and they have earned the right to continue. Breakfast is often modest — oatmeal, toast, fruit from the tree out back, coffee made in the kind of percolator that has not been manufactured in twenty years and which the household has somehow kept running. The caregiver is patient. The kitchen, in this hour, is one of the warmer rooms in California.
The midday is often when the day's small business gets done. A doctor's appointment in Santa Barbara. A trip to Trader Joe's, or to the small bakery on the corner of Cathedral Oaks. A stop at the bank, where the teller has been there for twenty years and knows the client by name. We drive. We accompany. We carry. We make sure the appointment is made on time, the questions for the cardiologist are asked, the prescription is filled at the pharmacy before we head home.
The afternoon, in Goleta, often involves the garden. The lemons, which never stop coming in. The roses, which the wife has been pruning for forty years and which she still wants to prune, even if her hands are stiff and her balance is uncertain. We sit with her in the garden. We hand her the secateurs when she wants them. We hold the basket. We are, briefly, the assistant gardener she has not had in fifty years.
Evenings here are quiet. Many of our Goleta clients still cook for themselves, even into their late eighties, and the caregiver's role is to assist rather than to take over. We chop. We pre-heat. We do the dishes. The cooking, by long custom, remains the client's. This matters. The kitchen is, for many older adults, one of the last places they are still themselves in their full competence, and the agency that takes that away too quickly takes more than it knows.
A Note on the Foothills, and the Sea
We are, in Goleta, fortunate in our walks. The trail along Lake Los Carneros, with its waterbirds and its early-morning fog. The path through Stow Grove, under the big eucalyptus. The bluff trail at Ellwood, where the monarchs cluster in the eucalyptus stands in winter. The beach at Goleta Pier, walkable on a still day. The long quiet streets of the residential neighborhoods, where the camellias and the bougainvillea spill over every fence.
Our caregivers know these walks. They know which ones the client has loved for thirty years and which ones might be new and welcome. They know how to grade the walks to the client's strength, and how to extend them gently when strength is returning, and how to shorten them respectfully when it is not. The walk, here as elsewhere, is one of the most protected hours of the day.
A Final Note for Goleta Families
If you are reading this from a house in Goleta — perhaps in one of the older neighborhoods near Hollister, or in one of the quieter developments along Cathedral Oaks, or up toward the foothills behind the university — and you are beginning to think about home care for a parent, for a spouse, or for the two of you together, we would be honored to be part of the conversation.
We will not arrive with a sales pitch. We will arrive with our attention. We will sit at your kitchen table, drink whatever coffee you are kind enough to offer, and listen carefully to what your household needs. We will tell you what we can do, honestly, and what we cannot. We will, if the fit is right, propose a beginning that is modest, sustainable, and respectful of your finances and your privacy.
Goleta is the Good Land. The aging that happens here, in our admittedly partial view, is some of the most graceful aging in California — and it has been earned by the people who have built their long, careful lives along these streets. They deserve home care that matches the lives they have lived.
That is what we are here, quietly, to provide.
— The House of Age Well Care