Do good fences make good neighbors?
It’s all happening.
Dear Reader,
Are you blessed with good neighbors? Or, at least neighbors who are pleasant and keep to themselves allowing you to keep to yourself as well? Whether you live in the city, suburbs, or country, we all have neighbors. Unless you are lucky enough to live far off the grid in the middle of the woods. In which case, I envy you. I live in the city. For most of my life, with the exception of some glorious county living, I've lived in either the suburbs or the city.
There have been loud neighbors, those without boundaries, and even some grumpy ones, but no one that I would say affected my life in any detrimental way. I would often (and still do) look outside first before I picked up my garbage or collected my mail to avoid some of the aforementioned boundary lacking neighbors. After all, I am an introvert who prefers not to engage in small talk whenever possible.
Never before have I had such a mean, nasty, angry, bitter neighbor like the one I've had for the last seventeen years. This woman hates everyone, but most importantly, she hates herself. She will find anything to complain about, no matter how petty. I'm reluctant to use the term Karen for two reasons. One: I have an amazing aunt named Karen and two: I wouldn't insult an actual Karen like that, since this woman is much worse. I won't go into the details, because they are more suited to a novella than a short newsletter. But suffice it to say, at times, I dreamed about putting the family in the van and hitting the open road. For quite some time, the neighbor's vines are literally tearing down our shared fence. My husband has repeatedly fixed it on our side, but her vines, that she refuses to cut, keep coming back and continue to ruin the fence. Because you can't actually have a normal conversation with this woman, my husband just continues to fix the fence on our side whenever it needs it.
That brings me to the title of the newsletter. I'm sure at one point you've read the poem, Mending Wall, by Robert Frost? I hadn't read the poem since high school, so I thought it was time to refresh my memory. Here's a link if you care to give it a read.
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The poem takes place in rural New England, and it involves the speaker and his neighbor coming together every spring to repair a stone wall that separates their properties. This act or ritual that continues throughout the poem basically represents the borders between people. And, while the speaker seems to feel that the wall is not necessary, the neighbor believes that it is, and keeps repeating the phrase, "good fences make good neighbors." This is stated almost as a mantra throughout the poem, as the neighbor just accepts what has been done for generations and doesn't question why. Walls are not nature's things, they are human things, and created to keep neighbors apart, but in this case, it also ironically brings them together. In my situation, nature is also destroying the fence (wall), but my neighbor and I (or more accurately, my husband), are not sharing a communal experience. We need the fence between our houses to maintain some form of civility, yet my husband is the only one performing the ritual.
In delving deeper into this poem, I discovered some interesting facts. Frost never stated what he considered to be the true interpretation of Mending Wall, allowing the reader to engage on a more personal level and draw their own conclusions. In this case, I'm going to draw my own conclusion and say, that I need that boundary with my own neighbor, and we will continue to mend the fence without her help to keep the peace, at least for a little while longer.
I hope you enjoy your week dear reader
xo, Christa
Thanks for reading-I’m glad you’re here.