Del rio hacia las montanas

Took a great "road trip" last night. All the way from Guadalupe Trail and Pueblo Solano, east on Candelaria to the last street, Camino de la Sierra.

But it started a long time ago. Many folks aren't aware that a lot of the land left by early Spanish residents of Albuquerque was plotted in slender east-west tracts allowing the owner to have a piece of the river bank, and a piece of the grazing in the foothills.

My "road trip" started in the communal garden I'm allowed to share with a bunch of folks who've been doing it so long they've got a (very rough) system.

I got to the garden in the evening sun and started hoeing weeds out of a row of bean plants. Some of the weeds looked like verdilargas to me, and they reminded me of my Grandmother Gonzales' cooking when we had a garden in my youth. Verdilargas might be called "stringweed" by some, but my abuelita made a great dish out of this unwanted plant. Back then, our immigrant Italian neighbor even showed us how to pluck the flowers off our squash plants; this would cause the fruit to proliferate and was delicious when fried in a light breading.

These thoughts were mixing in with the sensuousness of the dirt in my fingers as I caressed the beans and yanked the weeds. One guy showed up, a local restaurateur, and was curious to know if one of the other weeds were "Quelites." Quelites is another plant my grandmother made wonderful dishes with. Those old folks used Everything!

After weeding a bit I took the Rototiller and moved a row over, and then set about for the final chore as the sun dipped below the roof lines to the west. We had the water, drawn from the river, in a big pond with a nice island in the middle, two of our number tranquilly watching the rows. We siphoned water from the pond into the rows using short tubes. Then we watched the reflection of the sinking sun grow from the north end to the south end as water slowly filled the rows.

After awhile, the sun was down, the water was in the rows and I headed home. All the way up Candelaria, one of the last places in Albuquerque you can occasionally find the"Green Wave," I was imagining the residents of an Albuquerque circa 1650, or even 1850, who might have had to make their way down to the river to tend to the crops, and then had to make the long trip up into the foothills to gather their sheep. My road trip took about half an hour, but I was traveling hundreds of years back to when the same trip would have taken all day.

It was beautiful.