'Good fences make good neighbors.'

There are strange marks along the boundaries of our back yard. After much discussion, debate, and a little rancor, most of the neighbors have agreed to fences between our little kingdoms and how they will look--what kind of wood, the shape of the fence (scalloped or straight), how high, how far apart the boards will be. The one renegade neighbor who surprised the rest of us by popping up a small picket fence in the middle of the week, while most of us were away at work, will soon find himself surrounded by the towering privacy fences preferred by the other kings and queens. The great fence debate is over.

Some years ago, dutifully doing my literature homework while sprawled across my four-poster white bed in a room that overlooked the farm, with land as far as I could see, I read and re-read the evening's assigment: Robert Frost's "Mending Wall." The poem hit home with me even then. You get to know something about fences when you live on a farm. (A sidenote here--although my parents were no farmers, my family had called it that since the first generations made their way from Scotland and settled into the Appalachian hills.) Still, my uncle maintained a herd of cattle, a couple of horses, and an occasional corn crop nearby. And, of course, there was always hay growing that must be "worked" every year. (It's such a grueling process, no one in my family--particularly my brother and my uncle--ever talked about "harvesting" hay.)

A fence was an important part of the equation. If the fence was down at some point, the cows would break loose and trample the yard, particularly the flowers and shrubs my parents so meticulously maintained. Or the cows might make their way to "the road," which referred to either the main highway or the recently paved road that led into Prichard Branch, the hollow neighboring ours. Or the crop of hay would be ruined, or the corn eaten. Any way you looked at it, a downed fence was trouble. Sometimes hunters would cut their way through the barbed wire, or somehow bend it down enough to climb over without too many injuries to delicate regions, or they'd take apart the wooden railings. So, whenever a gap appeared in the fence, or when a cow appeared somewhere it shouldn't be, the rush was on to find the gap and mend the fence. Dinner was gobbled down, or served late, many a night for the sake of a mended fence. Once, after a particularly busy hunting season, and several attacks on the fence, my uncle decided to put in an electric fence. It worked well until one rainy day when I decided to take a short cut between my uncle and aunt's house and ours, and ended up in ankle-deep water and painfully attached to the electric fence, which I hadn't noticed in the rain and fog. My uncle heard my screams and knocked me down with a stick. The next day, the electric fence was disassembled.

In our well-ordered subdivision in the heart of the bluegrass, fences serve quite a different purpose. No cows to constrain--but babies, dogs and cats, and privacy. Living in a quilt-square subdivision means giving up the freedom of living out of sight of anyone but the occasional deer and squirrel (oh, yeah, and the cows). But it also means having a cul-de-sac filled with the laughter of children on a summer night, a network of neighbors and friends close by. But even those things have their limits, and the need for some sort of quiet space, a border to the kingdom, appears.

My neighbor said her husband had recently observed that "good fences make good neighbors," saying aloud what I had been thinking as we haggled over straight or arched, pine or cedar, privacy or picket.

Footnote:
An excerpt from Frost:

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why do they make good neighbors? 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." ... 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 neighbors."