Good fences

My neighbor has replaced the old and broken stockade fence which had less and less well hid his backyard from full-frontal view from the street with a new pine plank fence that really blocks.

Except that it doesn't really, because walking up the street, I can see around it and chat with him and his friends taking their ease in the cool of the evening. This leads me to wonder about privacy and how we shape it for ourselves: this revealed, that concealed. He is saying to me: I don't care for you looking at me directly, but I don't mind a little obliqueness if it means you have to lean on the chain link fence from the front yard and trade a few remarks, like about why the street side stain is a different color from that on the inside.

Sitting out in the evening, ah. Like this evening on Yori's front porch behind his thickly planted front year at the dead end of Mt Hope Street (literally, a ceremonial entrance to the cemetery) when suddenly people with kids and balls in plastic wagons came up  the road to go into the open space, and other groups came strolling out of it, and Yori and I got up and walked out and there were  introductions, conversations about local politics, a bit of playing with deflated soccer balls with the year and half year old, and tours of Yori's back yard and... Well, sorry I have to leave, people, but I need to get supper. We'll be in touch.

Robert Frost, one well-acquainted with irony, had fun with the line 'Good fences make good neighbors' in his Mending Wall, and asked 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 offence.

I remember once coming down from Mt Monadnock with a friend along a line of stone wall such as networks our forests, and he reciting Frost from memory. That wall, now a line of untended rubble, marks a neighborhood past and gone.

Well, neighbor, I take no umbrage at what you've put up: the first new wall since before you moved in, since the little girl who lived there before was my little girl's best friend. Sometimes we need to deflect the direct, penetrating gaze, but accept the more chatty looks coming catty-corner. Sometimes privacy is like a few artfully draped scarves, from which we can emerge, or into which we can retreat. It's the game. I'm ready to  poke my head around the corner of your fence and play.