Wine and Amistad

It’s cold here again, for now. Winter blew back in with 70mph gale force winds and dust so that I had to brace myself against a fence post, felt the grit in my teeth when I clapped and yelled for the goats who picked that exact moment to jog towards the ONE weak spot in the fence we have yet to fix (the rest is holding). Yesterday was brutal. But now it’s sunshine and snow and then 65* degrees next week between intermittent bouts of wind so fierce I now know what it is to feel like your skin could be scraped off in the sandpaper breeze. Daffodils have shot up like sunny side up eggs in every corner of every garden bed, and the town is covered in peach and cherry and pear blossoms so that the historic district is lined in cotton candy.

This is spring in Northern New Mexico.

This also marks the traditional opening of the acequias, an ancient irrigation system unique to this part of the country, created by Spanish settlment. These are intricate veins of ditches, hand dug hundreds (literally hundreds) of years ago, to divert water from the snow-melt heavy rivers and channel them down to the fields and valleys to more efficiently utilize the precious moisture. Any landowner lucky enough to have an acequia cut through their property AND - more importantly - who still retains the water rights allowing them a period of time to open the gate and let the water trickle onto their land, is required to be a member of their local ditch association. This is a community water association requiring those who legally can access the water to be responsible for maintaining the acequia ditch system: to keep it clear of debris, to make sure gates can open and close, to pay dues, attend meetings, and to never EVER never open their personal gates onto their land outside of the community watering schedule. That would be stealing water and would earn you a black mark equivalent to a scarlet letter. You could never live it down, your family name would be spit upon in conversation, you’d be hissed about in disgust over beers around pickup trucks on ditch cleaning days, men tossing angry glances to your place through squinted eyes. It doesn’t matter how ancient the rules, how rudimentary the tools of the trade may be, how archaic the entire system might seem to those from the outside: don’t f*ck with the acequia. It is as sacred as the mountain from which it draws water.