It is a relatively serious plan of mine to retire back home to New Mexico, preferably Taos. I’ve joked with my friend David about us sitting on our porches in our rocking chairs in our houses next to each other in Ranchos de Taos and yelling at kids to get off our…well, nobody out there has a lawn…. I’d like a place with some acreage and an orchard, on a trout creek if we’re totally dreaming here. But most importantly, with an old adobe. (The picture above is from the garden of my friend Maggie’s house in Escondida–my ideal old adobe.)
It’s impossible to exaggerate how much I love old adobe houses. I associate them with the happiest memories of getting sucked into my friends’ family life without comment, sorting pinto beans on the worn oilcloth on the kitchen table, getting fed spoonsful of sopa hot out of the pan, listening to the neighborhood gossip–until they switch into the really old Spanish so the kids can’t follow what they’re saying. Drinking yerba buena tea because you ate too much sopa. Asking for the names of the santos up in their nichos because we don’t have those in our church; learning to tell Santo Nińo de Atocha from Santo Niño de Praga (or Pragua as they say it in Taos; he’s the one in the frilly dress BTW). Getting lost in the house because they just built onto it when the family got bigger, and after a hundred years of that, it’s like a maze that goes up and down, in every direction. In the morning if you’re still around, no one acts surprised–they just feed you red chile and beans with fresh tortillas and eggs and let you drink some coffee (which your mom never does), and your mom probably calls at some point and you go home. No one worries about it.
Besides, adobe houses are really practical and sustainable for the climate: warm in the winter, cool in the summer. If they need fixing, you just mix up some clay and straw and dry it into bricks and plug ’em in. Plant a couple of cottonwoods outside to get big and block the sun and wind. It’s up to you whether you want to keep the flat latilla roof you can dry chiles on or you want to put on a pitched metal roof to shed the snow–both look nice. But a portal is de rigueur: sometimes it’s on the outside, sometimes it wraps around the big atrium in the middle of the house where the well used to be and maybe where there’s a fountain now, maybe not, where the tomatoes and hollyhocks grow in pots and the red chile ristras hang sheltered from the sandblasting summer wind; there might be a pomegranate bush, too, or a fig. Wherever it is, the portal is always deep and cool. There are always chairs–comfier than they look–because most of life happens out there, in every season except winter. You can keep an eye on things, on which way the weather’s turning, on who’s coming and going, on each other.
I started putting together a Pinterest board of ideas for my eventual future adobe hacienda and ran into trouble finding any I liked. I got a wee bit frustrated. And then I got a little annoyed. So now, unfortunately, I need to pause and write a brief open letter to my fellow gringos….
Dear Fellow Gringos,
Hi there! I, like you, am a big fan of old adobe houses. But what’s the point of buying one if you’re just going to try to turn it into suburban new construction? The ceilings are low for a reason. It’s made out of wood and mud for a reason. It doesn’t need central HVAC. If those things bug you, there are plenty of other nice houses out there for you to buy or build. Please leave the old adobes for those of us who like them the way they are (except maybe minus the packrat nests and electrical shorts).
Also, if you do buy an old adobe and you’re decorating it, please calm down. It seems like you either want everything super modern and minimalist, which is really jarring when you walk in the front door of a house that looks like the 18th century in New Mexico and then suddenly wind up in the future in Finland. Or, you go too far the other direction–putting every piece of everything you read about in Bringing Home Southwestern Style (plus half of the stuff in The Modern Spanish Hacienda) into the same room. You do not need to fit one more olla on top of that cabinet. That cabinet has enough ollas on it. Have you ever even used an olla? I haven’t, and I’ve been cooking beans since I was 10.
My point is, you can relax! Old adobes are supposed to be kind of messy and murky in the corners and worn around the edges and a little off-kilter. In other words, like home.
Thanks for listening,
Mourningdove
P.S. What is it with the ollas and you people? Giant empty ollas on their sides do not make fetching lawn ornaments. They just look kind of post-apocalyptic, like an entire civilization died at your house. Also, rattlesnakes are going to crawl in there to keep warm, so don’t say I didn’t warn you when it happens.
The Rookery 