Good Fences?

An immovable object meets a growing force. The city is full of such cases, of fences and street signs being absorbed by growing trees.

I think here of the dialectic in Frost’s “Mending Wall.” One voice says “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and the other, the more-often quoted, says “good fences make good neighbors.” I gravitate towards that something, the earth, heaving and shivering through the seasons, throwing the wall to pieces, as it will all our works. Not that we should stop making things, necessarily, however Sisyphean the task. Or should we? Fencing in trees, for instance, is a folly best abandoned.

Who doesn’t feel like that traveller from an antique land when walking in the northeastern woodlands and coming across an old stone fence, so laboriously made long ago and now forgotten, moss-covered, the home today of snakes and chipmunks?