Each of us has a special place in our hearts that fits the description of “home.” Perhaps it is the place we flee to that has to take us, or the spot where mom is, or the locale where kin and neighbors can be traced through generations. Often our sense of home is dependent on the building itself—The Home. It remains fixed in place while the occupants come and go over the years.

In my case, the home came to me with its own past, apart from my own. Rather than the home being part of my history, I am becoming part of its. This is because my home is very old—so old we would be guessing if we hazarded an age. The most educated guess was offered by the late Bainbridge Bunting, New Mexico’s finest architectural historian, who speculated that our home was built just after the Reconquest, around 1695. This calculation never fails to take my breath away. It also makes me a bit nervous with the responsibility of stewarding such a venerable structure. And it makes me wish I could call on something like a tree-ring-dating service to confirm or debunk the date, three hundred years plus change. There are lots of things out there to make one feel insignificant—stars, geologic time, adolescent children, to name a few. In my life I can also include my home. Truly, there is no place like home.

It helps to know my home was not initially a home but rather a work place. It is perched directly on Santa Fe’s Acequia Madre—the “mother ditch”—so close that if you dropped a pebble out the living room window it would land in the rushing water below. When the water is rushing, that is, which happens every Wednesday and Sunday during growing season.

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