I love our street. I love that it does not work well as a street. Unless you are a native you probably can’t even figure out how to pronounce its name—Acequia Madre—part Arabic, part Spanish, with the clunky English translation of “Mother Ditch.” I don’t live on a street, I live on a ditch.

No wonder the cars and trucks that attempt to maneuver its narrow confines and twisty route find themselves bumping up against the past as they rush to hook into real streets like Garcia or Paseo de Peralta. They fail to account for the fact that the speed limit on this street is predicated on reality rather than the usual caution and control. For this reason we often hear the sonorous tones of metal clanking as behemoth SUVs and oversize pickups gently whack their side mirrors together like mounted knights jousting out front.

Sometimes we find dotty oldsters, who can’t quite make the proper turn from the narrow street onto our equally narrow side lane, hanging with one tire in space over the miniature precipice that is the ditch itself. Most dramatic of all, one night when a once seedy, now upscale bar on Canyon Road disgorged its sloshed clientele at 2 a.m., we were roused by the harsh scream of a car slamming into two telephone poles as it ricocheted off the walls lining the street. The car had been channeled along like a projectile in some giant pinball machine, battering the inebriated occupant against the sides of its slots and loops. All of this is because my street is not a street at all, but rather a paved path lining an irrigation ditch—woe to the 21st-century mounted warrior who ignores the warp of the time travel that looms along its benign little meandering way.

The Little Mill, El Molinito, our little house, sits closest to the acequia giving us ringside seats for this clash between past and present. Our front windows are perched along the edge of the acequia so we hear and see the water rushing between the stone-lined banks—banks that seem to act as our personal moat reinforcing our sense of living with one foot in the medieval. A small footbridge across the acequia leads to our front door, seldom used as an entry since the car scene of the last 75 years has made foot traffic a quaint pastime at best and a perilous undertaking at worst.

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