I have been recently reminded of the Robert Frost Poem "Mending Wall." The speaker and his taciturn neighbor meet for the purpose of mending the wall that divides their property. The old neighbor keeps repeating the phrase "good fences make good neighbors" while the poem's speaker wonders if that is truly the case.
Frost's question and my often affectionate feelings for small town life have recently been put to the test. The first test came with our new next-door-neighbors' moving boxes. The house had been on the market for over a year. Not a McMansion or a grand Victorian, the house is cute but small and our neighborhood is nice but hardly posh. Relief at seeing a quiet-looking elderly couple move next-door soon began to melt away a bit at the husband's revelation to Andy that their grandson, also named Andy, would be out of prison soon.
What worries Andy, however, is not his prison doppelganger, but the piles of junk accumulating in their backyard that includes tools, Christmas decorations, many lawn chairs and coolers of various sizes, a box of faucets, and a microwave oven. Some of this junk is covered in blue tarps, the rest is not, and it is all left in the yard, in the rain. My mother says that they are elderly, and it is probably just taking them a longer time than it would for us younger folks to get organized.
I didn't tell mom about the grandson with the prison record.
Then a week after they moved in, my husband calls me at work to tell me that the neighbors are cutting down a tree on our fence line, and he thinks they may have damaged the fence. "Our new neighbors?!" I ask. "You're kidding!"
"No not the new ones. Different neighbors," he tells me.
Seriously? What is this? An invasion?
"I heard the power saws and went out to the back of our lot and asked them what they were up to and this guy said to me, 'cutting down a damn tree!'"
That ended Andy's exchange.
When I came home we both went into the back portion of our property. No sound of power saws, but our back corner had been cleared, like little redneck elves had come and butchered the underbrush in the back corner. Granted it needed it; clearing the small triangle-shaped portion of our property was on our to-do list. In the meantime because this part of our yard is intersected by three other lots, the underbrush had been a privacy shield until we decided what to plant. None of this underbrush was on our neighbors' property, so it befuddled us why Tree-cutter Snopes & Company had A) been in our yard, and B) why they cut all this out . . . without asking us!
As we stood there amazed, checking out our bent fence, the Tree-Cutter returned, driving his red pick-up right to the fence line. Seeing us, and probably thinking we were less than pleased, he sat behind the wheel of his truck a good two minutes, staring at us and talking on his cell before getting out.
I asked Tree-Cutter if he lived at this house. I had to ask him twice. "Naw. I wuz hired to cut this tree," he finally said. "It wuz overhanging that there shed;" and he pointed to our other neighbor's yard behind us. "He wanted it cut down. So I did," he said with a fair amount of hostility.
Apparently we had not been part of the small town Klan meeting that made this decision. For reasons still unclear to us, while on his tree-cutting mission Snopes & Company crawled over our fence, into our yard, and whacked out the underbrush in the back corner of our property. "Why did you do that?" I asked. He threw at us the names of the people that lived in these surrounding houses, invoking local genealogy, "Well that's Mr. So-an-so's mother-in-law!"and other southern non sequiturs, but he never answered our questions. Finally he cocked his head and looked at us with a glare straight out of Deliverance and spat at us, " Where are y'all from?!"
"What does that matter?" my husband calmly replied. To wit, Snopes threw up his hands and walked away.
Snopes had played a Southern card. The translation of his question was "Where are you from, you crazy Yankee liberals?" (To which ironically he was have only been about a quarter right.)
Once Andy and I had both cooled off, he pointed out that in England there were no private property laws; people could freely cross each others' land. Of course if we lived in England, I'd be happy and wouldn't care.
I added that I supposed they did do us a service for free. "The cops here might think us nuts if we reported him," I said. But I felt that my own "southernness" had been violated. After all, "Land is the only thing that matters, Katie Scarlett O'Hara!" I thought. But this Snopes had the look of a man who would burn barns, so we had wisely backed off. Crazy is the trump card any day, no matter where you are.
It doesn't, however, change the facts that we are now further exposed to another neighbor's lawn equipment and a huge shaggy horse-sized dog who has a clear view of our yard and our cats. I heard his stomach rumbling as he stared at Byron winding around my legs.
My mother said that the shrubs we recently planted will grow quickly, unfortunately not, however, over-night. In the meantime I struggle to "love my neighbor" . . . in a distant and abstract manner, all the while dreaming of fences!
