mapping,” a process for evaluating a site by adding layers of cumulative information, like putting the skin back on an onion. One layer might be prevailing wind direction, another topography, a third solar exposure. Siting the house ends up being an interactive response to place—maybe a tango one time, a jitterbug the next—not a postcard fantasy.

Our cover home by architect-builder Derald Polston features a floor-to-ceiling view of the Animas River valley in northwest New Mexico and, on the far northern horizon, the La Plata Mountains in Colorado, looming like a local Himalaya. On the mantle above the gas fireplace, Polston displays several Anasazi pots, relics of the people who inhabited this exact spot 800 years ago. Things happened here. It’s a place to be experienced not just in two dimensions—the view out those multi-plated windows—and not just in three—a quick stroll down to the river—but in four, through an awareness of time. It’s deep here. From Anasazi pots to a pioneer-era cemetery, reminders litter the landscape. People have loved this place for ages.

You can’t experience that love by just looking out the window, though. You’ve got to step outside. N. Scott Momaday has written that once in our lives, each of us should set our hands to the “remembered earth,” experiencing it from every angle, in every light, in every season.

Spring seems a good time to accept that call to action, a time to get some honest dirt under our nails in whatever place we call home.