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In the Robert Frost Poem, Mending Wall, both the narrator and the neighbor annually work on
fixing the wall that separates their properties; however, the narrator
questions whether a wall is necessary.
Neither of them have livestock to corral, so what are they trying to
keep in our out? The neighbor just
repeats, “good fences make good neighbors” because this is what his father used
to say. Does the neighbor really want
the wall, or is he just a traditionalist bent on carrying on a generational
habit? The narrator is more progressive
and would prefer to eliminate the wall entirely, though he doesn’t destroy it
since neither man can come to an agreement.
Well, this is what people who have nothing to do but sit
around and analyze poetry have to say about it. I have a different and more modern spin based on
real life. Good fences DO make good neighbors when your
neighbors are idiots.
Fences Discourage
Discourse with Annoying Neighbors
Well, in a perfect world they do. This doesn’t always work. Our neighbors have an above-ground pool, so
they are required to have a privacy fence.
This is how we know God exists.
He knew ahead of time we would need an avoidance mechanism.
We only boast a chain link fence, which is far too porous
and transparent. It provides no camouflage. There is no sneaking into our backyard to enjoy
peace and tranquility. We are like 12-point
bucks in the middle of an open meadow—perfect targets for verbal bullets shot
from mouths that never turn on the safety.
The married couple beside us are quite odd indeed. The husband corners us to talk but has
nothing to say. We just stare at each
other in awkward silence. The wife is
like fly paper—once she sticks you in conversation, you can’t break free. Their child is a wild, undisciplined imp who
creates a vortex of destruction. She is
a robot veiled in flesh whose circuitry often misfires causing her to repeat
annoying phrases like, “Can I help you plant flowers? Can I help you plant flowers? Can I help you plant flowers?” when I dare to think I can garden in
solitude.
Fences Keep Neighbors
in Their Own Yards
Except for the times they don’t. It was the first big snow of the season. Our kids excitedly bundled up, grabbed their
shovels, ice block makers, and sleds and headed to the backyard for snowball
fights, building snow cats, and barreling down the slide into a pile of white
powder. Snow is an insulation that makes winter quieter, which means we weren’t
outside for two seconds before the untamed heathen next door heard us and bounded
for our gate.
“Can she come over to play?” the father asked.
“Sorry,” I apologized, “but our gate is frozen shut so she
can’t get inside.”
No matter. Her father
hoisted her over the fence anyway, relieved to burden someone else with his unruly
waif. After all, he couldn’t be expected
to jump the high fence himself to guard her nuclear personality from detonating
on our property.
The mom is equally presumptuous. She’s the type who would laugh at a “Go Away”
welcome mat instead of connecting the dots.
That lock on our gate? Oh, that’s
not for her either, which is why she is perfectly comfortable unlocking it and
parking herself on one of our deck chairs.
Imagine if someone struck a conversation with you a mere two inches from
your face and body. Alarm bells would be
ringing in your head at the violation of your personal space. Back yards are like a mullet—it’s a private
party back there, so don’t enter without an invitation, code word, or secret
knock.
Just imagine when we try to spend time in our front yard
where there is no fence! The little
snippet drags all of our toys from the garage and litters them on the
lawn. She uses rocks from our kids’
collection to create mini land mines for our unsuspecting mower blade.
Yes, without a fence in the front yard, my happy plans for
weeding, mulching, and playing in the dirt with newly acquired blooms are
thwarted when the mom spies me and descends with her barrage of narcissistic millennial
jabber, absolutely unconcerned she is interrupting my scheduled work. The lack of front fencing even emboldens our
neighbors to stash their overflow of refuse into our cans on trash day without
permission.
Even when fences serve as little more than speed bumps, they
are better than nothing.
Fences Provide Cover
Fences would provide cover if decks didn’t elevate you to eye
level with your neighbors.
My deck is my happy spot.
It’s where I steal time to relax and read and look at recipes while our
kids play. Try as I might to shield
myself behind the seven foot table umbrella, the deck betrays me. Our neighbors apparently were never taught the
rudeness of interrupting people when they are eating. How many picnics on our deck have been
disrupted by neighbors thinking we must be spoken to because we can be seen—even
with barbecue sauce dripping from our lips and our mouths too full to
respond.
Try as we might to avoid contact, our cold shoulders and
stiffened backs do not spare us. Any smoke
spiraling up from our backyard fire pit is misconstrued as a “come eat s’mores
with us” signal.
Fences provide cover only if they are high enough and topped
with barbed wire.
Fences Hide Clutter
I like order. Our
neighbors do not. When they finish with
tools, pool accessories, bags of mulch, extension cords, and garden hoses,
these items are dropped in the yard and forgotten. Firewood rots in jumbled rows, a beacon to hungry
termites. Weeds stand guard, prepared to
strangle any bud that dares to dream of opening its petals. Flowers grow better in their clogged gutters
than in the ground. Landscape stones no longer see the light of day, and a
peeling deck frets it might cave under the weight of an ill-placed footstep.
Oh, we know what’s happening on the other side of that fence,
but despite its molding and bowing frame, what is out of our sights is momentarily
out of our minds.
Fences Create
Boundaries
Yes, the narrator of the Robert Frost poem is like the
no-borders-no-sovereignty radicals of today’s politic. Frost was ahead of his time. However, for those of us who want to embrace
the privileges of legal citizenship in our own backyards while remaining
shielded from unwelcome intrusion, then we must maintain our fences and build
our structures to keep out the idiots, even if the idiots are just pesky
neighbors. Robert Frost’s neighbor in
the poem is just more polite than we are.
Something
there is that doesn't love a wall,
That
sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And
spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes
gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work
of hunters is another thing:
I have
come after them and made repair
Where
they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they
would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please
the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one
has seen them made or heard them made,
But at
spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my
neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a
day we meet to walk the line
And set
the wall between us once again.
We keep
the wall between us as we go.
To each
the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some
are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have
to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay
where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear
our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just
another kind of out-door game,
One on a
side. It comes to little more:
There
where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all
pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple
trees will never get across
And eat
the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only
says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is
the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I
could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where
there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I
built a wall I'd ask to know
What I
was walling in or walling out,
And to
whom I was like to give offence.
Something
there is that doesn't love a wall,
That
wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's
not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said
it for himself. I see him there
Bringing
a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each
hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves
in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of
woods only and the shade of trees.
He will
not go behind his father's saying,
And he
likes having thought of it so well
He says
again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
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