What if Robert Frost's Neighbor Was Right?

New York Times

02-06-2025

'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.
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