Fences

In March when Cliff had his stroke, time’s straight arrow failed me.

It twisted into knots I couldn’t untangle because I couldn’t find the escape thread. I was stuck, worried by our circumstance.

Caught tight.

But not Cliff.

When he’d sorted himself out (somewhat), he turned to me and said, “I can’t plant a garden this year. You’ll have to do it.”

“Me? When have you ever seen me grow vegetables?”

He’d lost track of who I am and reeled off a plan for tomatoes, zucchini, beans, and squash-- rows of ideas that took my breath away. His vegetable garden has always mattered, not because we ever eat it all, but because he loves to give it away to neighbors. He rides his bike door to door, leaving deliveries, pleased by the thankful phone calls and thumbs up from car windows.

I couldn’t make it happen. The knot surrounding me drew tighter.

One day I was filling our birdbath, and our neighbor Rob walked across the yard to ask how Cliff was doing. I explained the garden dilemma.

“If he wants a garden, I can plant it,” Rob offered and set off to get supplies after we settled on a modest planting of tomatoes and green beans.

Each evening I returned from the hospital to find progress—weed removal, perfectly straight rows of string, tomato cages protecting leafy sprouts. Rob watered and hoed.

When Cliff came home from the rehab center, Rob announced he’d merely been the worker bee and the garden was all Cliff’s until he could do it next spring.

But Rob’s kindness continued. Having been through his own dire physical recovery once, he volunteered to help whenever Cliff fell. And fall he did, time and again. I’d call and Rob sprinted across the yard from his back porch to ours, picking Cliff up from one mishap after another. He set him on his bed one day and said, “I’m glad you call. Don’t think of me as your neighbor. I’m doing this because I’m your friend.” My eyes teared up.

Cliff and I have always lived in cities. Sometimes we knew our neighbors. Sometimes we didn’t.

And we’d always lived behind fences. Sometimes we were the ones who built the fence. 

Granted, I’d believed Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with the neighbor who announces good fences make good neighbors. I accepted the territorial protection of finite boundaries. I understand HGTV’s increased property value with attractive fencing. I know tall fences comfort those given to isolation.

When I read the poem this morning, I settled on Frost’s certain lines: …I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offense.

We live on a block of 6 houses without fences. Our yards are a borderless commons of dogs, children, birds, butterflies, trees, flowerbeds, neighbors who wave.

And Rob who planted a garden for Cliff.

I gave Rob the first tomato.

Not because he is a neighbor.

Because he is a friend.