“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down,” Robert Frost observed in his poem “Mending Wall.” I am one of those somethings. When the speaker of Frost’s poem wonders what use a wall might be that encloses no livestock, I wonder that, too. When he asks his neighbor just how it is that good fences make good neighbors, he is asking the question of my own heart.
I was irked 30 years ago when our neighbor said she intended to install a free-standing fence between our driveways. “For privacy,” she said. My husband and I raised no objection, but we disliked the very idea of the fence, which would block our view of the woods behind our neighbor’s house and make things unnecessarily difficult for the creatures that came and went from there. It seemed unneighborly to humans and wildlife alike.
We were a family who spent more time outdoors than in, always nearby when our neighbor pulled into her driveway. Once the fence was up, she was no longer obliged to speak to us. This, we suddenly understood, was the whole point of a privacy fence. Not to keep anything in or anything out but to render invisibility. To offer some approximation of solitude.
We never became close, but as the years passed, we settled into an ordinary sort of neighborliness, stopping to chat when we happened to meet on the street, helping each other out in emergencies. She mostly stayed on her side of the fence, and we mostly stayed on ours.
By the time she died two years ago, the unbeloved fence had become the scaffolding for pokeweed and native vines. Some of them I planted, and some came courtesy of our avian neighbors. Good fences, it turns out, make good perching places for birds with bellies full of berries and seeds.
The fence had been built in a shadowbox style, and the gaps between the boards gave reaching vines room for twisting. Their flowers fed pollinators, their leaves fed caterpillars, and their berries fed birds and other animals. Carpenter bees nested in the fence’s wood, and small birds nested on its crossbeams, perfectly camouflaged by vines.
Whatever I might have feared, the wild world made good use of the fence. Much better use than wildness had ever made of the strip of grass the fence replaced.
After our neighbor passed, a developer bought her modest, meticulously maintained house and reduced it to rubble. The backhoes took her flower beds and her flowering trees with them. For the past 18 months, a shiny three-story McMansion has been rising in their place.
As workers came and went, I thought about my fiercely independent neighbor, who had spent so much time tending her flower beds. Over the years, her fence had become, in my mind, an emblem of the many principles and beliefs that separated us. She was different from me in nearly every way imaginable, except for our mutual love for flowers.
During our 30 years in this house, we have given over more and more of this yard to the needs of our wild neighbors. The large brush pile in back is a place for them to hide. The pollinator beds are filled with nectar-producing flowers and the host plants of butterflies. Fruit-bearing trees grow alongside one street on this corner lot, and the yard on that side of the house is a miniature meadow.
Ours is a carefully tended but scruffy-looking place, at odds with what is fashionable in home landscaping. After the workmen next door tore the old fence down, I had no doubt that a new fence would go up in time. The developer understands that anyone who buys his sort of house will want boxwoods and turf grass. They will want to be visibly isolated from the wild yard next door.
Against my noblest inclinations, I found myself hoping he would install an even taller fence, something that would hide the villa rising high above the old fence line. When I look out the window above my writing table, I have grown accustomed to seeing hummingbirds darting among climbing vines. I want to keep my focus on them. Not on the monstrous house behind them.
The new fence sits on top of a concrete wall — taller than the fence it replaced, as I had hoped, but far less neighborly. Unlike the old shadowbox fence, this new fence has a front side and a back side, and it’s the back side that faces us. Worse, its unbroken expanse gives climbing vines no purchase.
It took 30 years for the realization to dawn, but once the new flat-board fence went up, I finally understood that my late neighbor had gone to some expense to make the fence she built as attractive on our side as on hers. This choice was her version of neighborliness. I was just too caught up in my own contrary definition of neighborliness to see it.
All this long, lovely spring, I’ve been thinking of her, and of Robert Frost and his neighbor. I thought of them while the carpenter we hired was building a trellis made from framed-out cattle panels that he installed on our side of the new fence. I thought of my neighbor again as I shopped for vines at the new native-plant nursery, aptly called Wonder, just outside Nashville. Now native honeysuckle and Carolina jasmine and pipeline, among others, grow in place of the vines that did not survive the construction next door.
The young families here must see all this unnecessary trellis-building, this house-hiding activity, and think of me the way I once thought of my late neighbor. I am now the opinionated old woman on the street.
I still number myself among the somethings that do not love a wall, for too many of them interrupt wildlife patterns at a time when wild creatures are already struggling, but I’ve also lived long enough to know that love is a mutable thing. Truth sometimes dawns too late. Time shifts more than stones. Tumbled-down walls can’t always be mended.
Two months ago, the soil beneath the new fence was all but ruined, packed hard by heavy equipment, pocked by spilled gravel, but spring’s generous rains have softened and swelled the hard, tight earth. New vines are pushing upward, their tendrils twisting around the wire of the new trellis. It won’t be long before those wire panels have become a solid mass of green, dense with leaves and flowers.
Surely even Frost could not fault a wall made of leaves and flowers. I think my late neighbor would have loved this fence that feeds bees and butterflies and glittering emerald hummingbirds and all manner of winged creatures that will never love a wall.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
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