Fences

Once you have a fence you can’t really get ride of it easily. I’ve been trying to think of a way that you could, but I can’t. I think that’s because no fence is really yours. It’s your fence, but also three other peoples’ fence too. Whoever lives next to you, on either side, owns part of your fence, and the same with the person living behind you. The gate is yours, the rest of it is only partially yours, a fraction yours, a third. And like anti-ballistic missiles in a peace agreement no one wants to get ride of their fence first. And in fact with a fence you can’t. Maybe if you convinced your neighbors on all three sides to take their part of the fence down with you, had mutual permission to remove the fencing from around your property a person could do away with fences. But that doesn’t seem very realistic. Even so, if your fence were gone then the three other properties and your own would look like one great big green inverted T or like one of those Tetris pieces that’s shaped like two perpendicular lines. Even if you convinced the surrounding five properties to your home to each remove a portion of their fence, so you and the neighbor across the backyard would lose three fences and those homes which bookend the two of you would only lose two fences, one which they shared with you and the home across the backyard from you and the other which they shared with the other respective bookend homeowner on their end of the six properties there would still be the upset that six garages would be left scattered seemingly aimless through out an expansive green lawn made from six different and before individual plots. Maybe though, if a neighbor on one side were to move and you were to act in the dead of night and quickly remove one third of your entire fence, the fence shared with the emigrating neighbor before the home was bought but while still vacant the problem of fencing could be dealt with however slowly. And, if you lived in that one home long enough then maybe, just maybe, eventually there would be no fences; at all, anywhere. It’s possible. After all, each fence does lead to next.

Where I live now there aren’t any fences. I guess I just got lucky. I know one day though I'll probably live in a place that is more fenced in than this one now and I don’t know if there will be anything I can do about that. Hopefully I’ll have really nice neighbors, or neighbors with the same sense towards fences as I have and we can take our fences down together on some sunny summer afternoon; mow our lawns and water our grass and respect the boundaries our lawnmowers and hedge clippers carve into the earth instead of using the ugly aluminum and iron fences that were there before. But then again maybe that’s wishful thinking, or maybe it’s just passive aggression, and maybe it would just a quitter way of separating myself from people around me. What’s better, an unspoken fence, or a real one you can lean on, climb over and build a gate in?

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."
-Robert Frost

Caleb, prospective home owner