HOW TO BARTER FOR EVERYTHING

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Over the years our bartering became even more diverse as our lives increased in complexity. We started a guide—book business, publishing books that I wrote about hiking, backpacking, and cross-country skiing in New Mexico. After I learned to typeset the books on the computer, I bartered for the use of my neighbor's laser printer with articles for her local newspaper. I got my friend, Barbara, a talented graphic artist to design the cover of one of my books for a huge philodendron plant that had taken over our greenhouse. Mark began making sculpted boxes based on traditional boxes that held figurines of religious santos (or saints). Only instead of placing saints inside, he made figurines of famous artists by attaching photos of their faces to sculpted bodies. These pieces were sold in galleries, and Mark traded Barbara his Vincent Van Gogh box for a beautiful stained-glass lampshade. He also traded his Tolstoy box to our photographer friend

Alan for a print from his prestigious collection. To complete our art collection, we traded for two lithographs from Miki, several pastels, an oil from John, and drawings from Jim. Other trades included a pair of metal-edged skis for refinishing a dresser; an 11-day stay at a cabin in southern Colorado for a built—in book cabinet; and guide books for earrings.

In 1991, we even traded houses. Fed up with Placitas' change from a small, rural community to an upper middle-class suburb of Albuquerque, Mark and I decided it was time to move farther north, where the type of life we originally sought in Placitas still existed in more remote Hispanic villages. In anticipation of that move, we traded houses with a family who wanted to attend school in Albuquerque, and whose house on a llano (flat ground above a river) at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains provided us with irrigated land and a community that still grew its own food, cut its firewood, and was connected to a sense of what was important. At the end of the trade, we sold our house in Placitas (a heartbreaking, albeit necessary experience) and moved to a small village not far from the llano, where we continued to write books, make boxes, grow a vegetable garden and a big field of garlic, and best of all, barter.

Our neighbors immediately offered their time, products, and hearts to usapricots for peas and squash, plums for milk and eggs, friendship and trust for our commitment to their way of life. We feel connected to our new home, and to the people whose families have been here for hundreds of years. Being a part of the way they live, being able to trade the fruits of our labor for their generosity and kindness, connects us to a life worth living. The intimacy that barter brings, the attention to what you offer and what you receive in return, makes life richer and more meaningful. No matter how tied you are to today's complex market economy, where money is often the measure of your worth, you can always find something to trade.

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