On Not Loving a Wall

Good neighbors take down fences.

Photo by Nihon Graphy on Unsplash

“Good fences make good neighbors.”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.”

Mending Wall by Robert Frost is one of those poems that people cite for any number of reasons. Its lines can be cherry-picked to lend a lazy stamp of gravitas to opinions about any sort of boundaries. Need a literary allusion to add weight to that letter to the editor about some personal, regional, local, or geopolitical dispute? There’s that poem. Not the one about the best lacking all conviction. The other one, about good fences making good neighbors. I’ll Google it.

The poem tells a deceptively simple story. In rural New England, a stone wall divides two properties. Every winter, the wall’s boulders shift and fall; every spring, they must be wedged back into place. The two neighbors who own the land walk side-by-side with the wall between them, mending it. One side is sunny; the other is deep in shade. The sunny-side fellow tries to convince the shady one that they don’t need the wall.

“My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.”

That’s a charming, persuasive argument. So why don’t these two guys sit down and share some folksy wisdom over a pint of home-brew? We don’t know. But I can tell you what happened in my own life when a fence came down.

It’s hard to believe that Brian and Jeannie moved into the house next door to us in 2000. That was twenty-four years ago. Even more impossible: it wasn’t until 2015 — fifteen years later — that the fence that separated our yards came down.

That’s right. For a decade and a half, my husband and I let a twenty-five-foot length of twisted steel wire keep two of the world’s best people at a distance.

It was a more than a misunderstanding, although there was that. Towards the end of the poem are these lines:

“He moves in darkness as it seems to me, / Not of woods only and the shade of trees.”

With the change of a pronoun, this could have been my epitaph. Because a fence came down, I’ll have to find something different. Something positive.

Why was it there in the first place?

The previous owner had installed it after adopting a fluffy white dog the size of a shoebox. Snickers wouldn’t have been able to break through a foot-high cardboard barrier, but Bob took things to extremes. The steel links were built to withstand hurricanes, which are not known to journey as far inland as Minnesota. The posts, embedded in concrete set below the frost line, gave the fence such stability that you could have used it to calibrate a surveyor’s level, to measure the north-south axis of an undefended, yet somehow not exactly neutral, border.

I stood with my husband, Tim, in our kitchen. We watched through the window as the contractors connected sections of wire fencing, mixing and pouring cement under Bob’s watchful eyes.

“That’s a lot of cement,” Tim said. “I don’t think Snickers is going anywhere.”

“Let’s pray for a nuclear holocaust.” The steel glinted, bright as weaponry. “Or we could sneak out some night and plant Virginia creeper.”

“Isn’t that outlawed by the Geneva convention?”

I sighed. “You’re no fun.” We watched as Bob, hand encased in a plastic bag, teased bits of wet cement from the grass, as if picking up dog poop.

I’m sure he sensed our disapproval. A week later, he knocked on our back door. I didn’t recognize him at first. Old T-shirt, ripped jeans? Bob?

“I’m thinking of moving the clothesline,” he said. “How about if we share?”

“Share?”

On the opposite side of Bob’s back yard were two cast-iron poles with crossbars on top and ropes strung between. I felt a surge of longing as I remembered running into wet sheets, my mother catching me, laughing.

“One pole on my side of the fence, the other on yours. I don’t use all the lines. You probably don’t need more than three. Sound good?”

Bob directed the clothesline’s placement; Tim worked the posthole digger and poured cement. It took three hours to get it aligned at the proper angle to the fence. Compass, tape measure, levels, more concrete. By the time they finished, it was past noon.

“What’s wrong with navigating by the sun?” Tim wasn’t pleased that his Saturday had been hijacked.

“Didn’t the Vikings do that? They ended up in Minnesota.”

Bob moved to Kansas six months later, taking Snickers but leaving the fence. And the clothesline. I liked the clothesline.

Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

Over the years that followed, I watched people walking down the alley stop and perform an actual double-take, leaning to one side and then tilting their heads to the other squinting. One pole on one side, and . . . How does that work? I smile as they catch on.

“It’s not an optical illusion!” they call out.

“Nope. We’re just good neighbors,” I reply, then return to hanging laundry.

Good neighbors. Ha. I was the one walking in darkness.

Nature will always find a way around barriers. Gray squirrels, our apex species, rule the branches above; chipmunks tunnel underneath. Periwinkle vines and snow-on-the-mountain make overtures to the ferns and hosta next door.

Humans do the same. It’s an evolutionary mandate: Reach out or die. One day in 2007, Jeannie and I talked over the fence as we hung laundry together.

“Looks like we both shop at Macy’s.” We had identical Maidenform bras, pink with tiny brown polka dots.

“That’s hilarious!” She didn’t add, But yours is too big. It was obvious that none of the clothes I was pinning to the line fit me. The shorts I was was wearing would had been around my ankles had I not cinched them with a belt. I didn’t say, My best friend broke my life six months ago. Since then I’ve lost forty-five pounds. Jeannie didn’t say Hey look at you, skinny girl? What’s your secret?

Instead, she told me about the day, shortly after moving in, that she saw my daughter, age sixteen, walking home from school.

“She was wearing a tiny plaid skirt and ripped fishnets. Doc Martens. Purple hair. That’s when I knew we had great neighbors.”

I didn’t tell her about the times I’d taken her to the salon when she wanted green, fire-engine red, or peacock blue hair, or. the time it turned orange and fell out. I reached down to pick a noxious weed. Crushing it in my hand, I thought, This is me.

Jeannie came around to my side of the fence and hugged me tightly. “I love you,” she said. I still carry that moment inside of me, a touchstone, reminding me of the first time Jeannie saved my life.

Tim was reserved. His work, as a behind-the-scenes librarian, and his interests — carpentry, landscaping, woodworking, home repair, computers — were solitary and meditative. He built desks, cabinets, tables, chairs, armoires, chests of drawers. His retirement project, a Shaker-style headboard of white maple, was built with the care and expertise of a journeyman woodworker.

Gradually, he took on most of the household work. He shopped, cleaned, cooked and paid bills as I spiraled down.

Brian and Tim talked. They told jokes. They had long email exchanges and conversations. I know that they shared a true intimacy. Tim didn’t need to tell me that Brian was the closest friend he’d ever had. I’m guessing that there was a touchstone moment or two between them as well.

In September, 2015, one conversation changed everything. I don’t know If I spoke first, or if Jeannie did.

“I thought you liked the fence.”

“I thought you did.”

That afternoon, the fence came down.

It wasn’t as hard as we thought.

That was the beginning of nights on our neighbors’ patio. Sitting around the fire pit, we shared charcuterie plates, bottles of wine, and many years’ worth of conversations and laughter. At two a.m., or earlier if the neighbors called the police, we stumbled home, unimpeded.

Brian and Jeannie moved to Texas in 2019. Minnesota winters are brutal, and the ocean breezes are kinder to stiff joints and autoimmune disorders. But because they are our forever neighbors, and because they are the best people, they show up when we need them. They showed up:

When our daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer, in 2020.

When my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer, in 2022.

When he went into hospice, a year later.

When I sat sobbing on my unmade bed in my half-cleaned house, unable to face his memorial celebration until Jeannie came, put her arms around me, and saved my life again.

Every Wednesday at 5:00 p.m., for the virtual happy hour that gets me through the week.

More times than I can count.

The best people.

As I walk through the house, everything reminds me of Tim. He wanted me to write. But again and again, I was Writer, interrupted.

“I’m sorry,” I say to the black plastic box containing his ashes. Then I sit down in front of my computer, and write. These are Robert Frost’s words. And they are good words.

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or out.”

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