Religion
Related: About this forumMending Wall - Robert Frost
Mending WallSomething there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.
The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
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.
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.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!"
I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well.
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Warpy
(111,417 posts)and that is when farmers dig up more rocks, they put them at the edges of their fields instead of pitching them into a neighbor's field and since New England is mostly glacial moraine, rocks pop up every time it rains, every time a field is tended, every time the farmer walks through it. When people asked me what I raised in my garden, I'd tell them "rocks, mostly."
Now those old fences are tumbledown affairs going through woods and prized by suburbanites even when the angle through their property is inconvenient.
But yes, nature doesn't like the nice, neat walls and seeks to rebury all those rocks as quickly as possible for another batch of farmers to dig up and put back at the edge of the garden or field.
pinto
(106,886 posts)Another feature of rural New England.
Warpy
(111,417 posts)I'd experienced in Dixie. I adapted well and quickly.
I never got used to all those damned rocks, though.
pinto
(106,886 posts)Amazing that the northern New England farmers made a go of it.