I lived away from northern New Mexico for many years. After returning to Pojoaque, the small village where I grew up, I realize there were many things about home that I missed. Now that I’m back, I experience glimpses of the place home used to be, a place that is nearly a myth today. Memories take me back almost a half-century, before the progress wrought by casinos, supermarkets, and highway interchanges, before television made us citizens of the world and began to dominate our lives. I remember best those things and events that I experienced with the senses.

Like water. For me it was the simple, quiet network of acequias, cool and fast moving, the lifeblood of the village. My favorite spot was an intersection where a tall, overgrown weeping willow cradled the running water with its roots. Oh, how my friends and I loved to play in that water! It was our private recreation area. We would flee our chores and race to the ditch, pulling up our skirts and rolling up our pants legs as we waded in.

We held fierce competitions over minnows and tadpoles; we spent hours on our knees and bellies, perched over the water’s edge attempting to catch a coveted salamander. We talked, our conversation peppered with the superstitions of youth: Not one of us doubted that a long horsehair in a jar of ditch water left in the crotch of the willow would become a water snake! The adults kept an eye on us, often appearing just in time to pluck a playmate from the brink by a belt loop before he toppled headfirst into the water.

A recent visit to my neighbor’s place got me thinking about the old practice of digging an acequia. I was not prepared to see how the process had been transformed. A backhoe was trenching-out the ditch; it contained an 8-inch-diameter blue pipe that carries the water underground and out of sight. This ditch was nothing like the traditional hand-dug acequia from which water flowed through crude gates to meander all over gardens and orchards. Now it was a system of valves and faucets, of order and control. The water would no longer be the subject of feuds among family members and neighbors. No need anymore for an alert landowner experienced in open irrigation to stem the flow into the neighbor’s yard or to head off a stream that would “waste” the water by flooding the vega instead of the fruit trees.

In the old days, I would have pitched in to help dig the ditch and pass the time talking. Instead, my thoughts detached from the scene as I contemplated these changes. Once in the trench, the pipe will be buried and the land leveled to look like it did before. In time, only the idea of an acequia will remain. Gone will be the smell of wet earth, the patches of fragrant yerba buena, the deep green mats of spicy watercress growing on the edge of the glassy water.

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