Gone is the neighbor I never knew

He popped his whitened head through the fence one day, while repairing a broken post, and said, “Good fences make good neighbors.”  Now the house lies dark, a “For Sale” sign posted.

I’ve always endeavored to get to know my neighbors wherever we’ve lived.  New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Missouri, Taiwan, NW China, and a brief stay in another Portland house.  I think this has been the hardest neighborhood of all.  We hug a busy street, no sidewalk, high fences on the other three sides.  Not really a neighborhood as much as a collection of isolation wards.  Early on after moving in, I went over to meet each of the adjacent property owners, to no avail, though my chicken eggs opened the door a crack at one house. 

This elderly gentleman, with whom we’ve shared a backyard fence these past three years, was also a breakthrough of sorts for our good neighbor plan, or so we thought.  But apparently he understood the need for boundaries in relationships more than the relationships themselves, at least as far as neighbors are concerned.  However, as a follower of Jesus, I live with the idea that the onus of friendship is on me, not on my neighbor.  And so, from time to time, I’ve tried to make contact.

Then one day earlier this year a couple who live on the other side of him informed me that this neighbor’s wife had died.  I was doing my Easter tradition, passing eggs around to our neighbors, eggs from our five laying hens.  I left a carton on his darkened doorstep.

Fences are good for some things, like protecting our chickens from mischievous raccoons or keeping our pug from wandering off.  And in this world of full self-exposure on the internet, boundaries are certainly underrated.

Robert Frost famously took to task the old English proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” writing, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out / And to whom I was like to give offense."  Frost went on to say that nature itself seems bent on bringing down such barriers.

His observations about nature certainly hold true when it comes to my neighbor’s fence, whose posts lean precariously inward even more than before they were fixed.  There probably was good reason to build such fences in our neighborhood, and we enjoy the privacy as much as the next one.  But I wonder if the fences themselves have kept the neighborhood from forming or merely reflect the intent of its inhabitants to remain islands unto themselves.

I never got to know the answer to that wonderment from this man who exercised constant futility to maintain a wall that protected him from our pug.  He really didn’t know how to repair that fence.  If you’re going to replace the posts, at least anchor them deeply and with cement.  But who am I to judge?  Building fences has never been my forte.

Now his house of three decades sits silent, waiting for the highest bidder in a market begging bidders.  Meanwhile, I’ll be watching keenly for the “For Sale” sign to come down.  Quicker than you can say “Robert Frost,” I’ll be over there knocking on the front door, egg carton in hand.  After all, good neighbors bridge fences and mend breaches in relationships one good egg at a time.