Connections: Picket Fences

Robert Frost would, I think, find it ironic that the most often repeated line from his poem “Mending Wall” is his neighbor’s insistence that “good fences make good neighbors.” The poet, you see, doesn’t really seem to agree. He says:

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.

Reading over the familiar poem recently — while wrangling with a question of neighbors and fences myself — I was surprised to find myself quite touched. As a child, I, too, knew farm fields and stone walls. I was even asked to recite another one of Frost’s most popular poems, “The Road Not Taken,” at my eighth-grade graduation ceremony. (A few years later, when I left home as a supposedly sophisticated college student, I — like my similarly sophisticated friends—dismissed Robert Frost as square, and didn’t think of him again for decades.)

I wasn’t waxing poetic several years ago when, with no notice, the owners of a new house across the lane I live on suddenly constructed a long stretch of high, ugly stockade fence where a pretty hedgerow had long stood. I hated that stockade. Still do, in fact. It looks out of place, unneighborly, an affront, even. Behind the stockade, what remains of some handsome privet is now hidden from view. 

I couldn’t understand what those property owners—who, by the way, sold the house and moved away not so long after putting up their stockade eyesore — had been thinking. If they were trying to keep out deer, they could have chosen a high wire fence like the one installed by some neighbors on the other side of our house; six-foot wire fences, at least, are relatively unobtrusive and more neighborly. For a long time I had daydreams about inviting the stockade people over for a coffee so I could explain to them that East Hampton has always been all about picket fences, especially those with climbing roses on them, but I never did. Frankly, I was too annoyed and didn’t imagine pulling off the conversation in quite the charming manner the situation called for.

This week, I am back to musing about fences because the old and not-so-old picket fences around my own backyard are falling down. Someone, and I don’t know who, has even tacked up a 4-by-4 on a particularly wobbly section. No one in the family will own up to it. Maybe this is a neighbor’s tactful gesture. 

One course of action I have been considering is to advertise (in the Star classifieds, of course) for used picket fencing. People these days seem to always be discarding them. Weathered picket fences, I reason, would fit in better around here than new or freshly painted pickets. 

My husband, meanwhile, has suggested post-and-rail fencing as perhaps more practical, but I have rejected it. My knee-jerk reaction is to argue—as if I were some sort of fence historian, which, admittedly, I am not — that post-and-rail fencing wasn’t traditional here except on pastures. That argument shows its weakness, however, when I am reminded that, of course, the perfectly attractive fencing that divides the Star office and the East Hampton Library driveways, which I stroll past several times a day, is post-and-rail. 

And here is where Frost comes in. 

In “Mending Wall,” the poet gently chides his neighbor for persisting in repairing a stone wall that divides their properties even though that stone wall is no longer necessary, all livestock having long since departed. The poet, in other words, teases this neighbor for sticking obstinately to a traditional family practice that has no current utility.

My apple trees will never get across 

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 

If I’m to be honest, my insistence on pickets could be considered akin to the attitude of the Frost neighbor. Do I really need to mend my pickets with pickets just because it’s tradition? I haven’t answered that question yet, and perhaps I’d better take a poll of other family members (who tend to be even more obstinately traditional than I am when it comes to these aesthetic decisions). But I will try to take a Frostian wall-breaker view and at least get prices on alternatives. Who says poetry isn’t useful?