Actually, Mark and I and numerous friends and neighbors built that house in Placitas, where Mark and I lived until the early 1990s with our two children. Neither of us had any building experience. Mark was a man of the mind—a steel trap one at that: poet, keeper of rare books, jazz aficionado, fledgling artist, and master of Trivial Pursuit. I was a college drop out who had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. We both ended up in Placitas because of the time and place: the freedom of the early 70s, the search for a different kind of life, and the draw of that hackneyed New Mexican “enchantment.”
I somehow got it in my head that I was going to build a house before I met Mark. With money from my mother I managed the down payment on five acres of land outside the village in an area where other twenty something’s were also building houses from scratch. I considered several design options, all adobe of course, and finally settled on two stories with a gambrel roof so one could stand up straight in any room of the upstairs. I drew up blueprints. How I managed to do this I have no idea. There was no YouTube to see how to design and draw up plans for a house because there was no Internet (at least for us plebeians). I hired a man with a backhoe to dig the foundation. I must have gone to the library for adobe building books because I had him dig the footing wide enough to lay the adobes length wise, not side wise, for better insulation.
Then I met Mark, which was quite fortuitous because although he didn’t know anything about building, his landlord and friend Tom did. We hired him to teach us how to prepare a footing for the cement truck, lay cement block for the stem wall, and stack adobes. We mixed all the cement and adobe mud for this in wheel barrels and laid all of it ourselves. Of course before we did all this I had to persuade Mark that building a house was a good idea when he thought spending his time working at a bookstore or library—he was working at the famous Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque when I met him—and writing poems and reading books for fun was a better idea.
But he got into the rhythm of things until we got to the second story and he fell through the staircase opening and the piece of plywood that had been laid over that opening fell on his head. The cut ran from just above an eyebrow, up his forehead, and then halfway across the top. They stitched him up at UNM Hospital—hundreds of stitches in two layers—and then put sandbags around his neck until they could determine if it was broken. It wasn't. But his enthusiasm was quite broken and he lay in bed for a good long while recovering. In the meantime I was back at the house building the rafters from two by twelve rough lumber. All I had was a skill saw. All I’ve ever had is a skill saw. When I needed new boards cut for the hoop house door I went to my neighbor’s house and he cut them with his table saw. When I had to replace the molding on my windows I went to my other neighbor, who’s a woodworker, and he cut them with a table saw. Or maybe it was some other kind of saw, as he and his wife have every woodworking tool ever invented. Mark had a jigsaw for a while but I don’t know what happened to it. And yes, of course, we had and have a chainsaw, but that’s a requirement to live here.
Anyway, I had to wait for Mark to recover before we could lift the rafters into place—along with any other bodies we could round up. There were many more adventures along the way, like Tom hanging on a rope over the dormers attaching the tin and me, pregnant, carrying Mark buckets of plaster up two tiers of scaffolding. And here I am now in a house in El Valle that’s almost three stories high with lofts above the second floor. We had to buy a really big ladder to paint the window trim and plug the hole under the rafter where the bats were getting in, but I hired a crew to stucco the house twenty years after we moved in. They were on three tiers of scaffolding. I don’t even go up the ladder anymore.
