Jaci Dawn

Good fences make good neighbors.

I don’t know if that is necessarily true, but I can tell you about the fence around our yard. To the north we have an elderly neighbor widow who is not terribly social. She’ll speak if she must, but for the most part I get the impression she just doesn’t want to talk to us. I chalk it up to age and paranoia. She was friends with the people who lived here before us: the ones who remodeled this house but nearly lost the peony gardens in the process. We’ve brought back the peonies, but haven’t done much for the remodeling. We also don’t attend the same church, which is probably most of it. Still, we are on congenial terms and have had no problems sharing a fence.

Directly to the west of us, we share a fence line with two different neighbors. The north end is a 12′ fence that belongs to them but is leaning dangerously into our yard and is constantly overgrown with ivy and some noxious creeper that we tear down off of our side of the fence every year. They do nothing with their corner of noxious weed except to let it grow. All we really know about them is that they love yellow labs and have at least one in their yard all year. Their dog barks more than ours and howls, but it isn’t obnoxious. It did try to dig under the fence last year, but we put up boards and haven’t had any issues since. Murphy doesn’t seem to know it exists, but he’d likely welcome the company.

The chain link fence neighbors hold the fifty feet of western fence on the south end. They are renters and keep pretty much to themselves as well. We were not sure how we were going to like them as one is a “collector” of junk, but the sister moved in last summer, cleaned up the yard and landscaped a beautiful vegetable garden. The brother owns a pit bull that plays along the fence line with Murphy. They used to have a German Shepherd that did the same, but we haven’t seen the shepherd for months.

I have a theory, however: they had company one fine summer day and this company brought a pet bunny over. The bunny and the shepherd were left alone in the backyard together. It did not end happily for the rabbit (but at least the rabbit did not escape to our yard and end unhappily in our yard). We never saw the German Shepherd again after the infamous deceased bunny episode.The pit bull seems friendly enough and Murphy likes it as well as he did the shepherd.

The fence to the east doesn’t border anyone else’s yard: it merely faces the front yard with an imposing height and two latched gates.

And the south fence is co-owned between our neighbors Bob & Virginia and us. Bob & Virginia will stop and gab awhile if we all happen to be out at the same time. Bob & Virginia are long since retired: he was a professor of art at the community college for many years, specializing in welding sculptures.

To the north, the neighbor’s yard is a manicured garden with roses, rhodies, boxed-in beds, small flowering trees, and a neat lawn. She pays landscapers to keep it mowed & weeded now, but for a time did it herself. Before she did it, her husband did all of the yard work. The yard was what her husband left her when he died.

Bob & Virginia’s yard is bare ground under tall fir trees, no rare plantings or pretty flowers or weeds to worry about.

Strange sculptures sprout from the ground. I feel weird taking photos of their yard to post on the internet, so you will just have to believe me about that. I love Bob’s artsy yard. Low maintenance, high iron, interesting to look at. Virginia’s cat perches on the roof of their house and teases Murphy.

Good neighbors. Or at least not bad ones. And certainly not weird ones.

Good fences.