Fences

        If you stood on the deck overlooking our backyard and did a 180 degree turn from left to right, you’d see that our yard shares a fence with five neighbors. I’d call them a motley crew, except that it’s highly unlikely that this group of oddballs would ever band together.  

This is an older, established neighborhood. When it “opened” in the late 1970s, Manorwood was the premiere development up here on South Hill. Our house was a stop on the “Street of Dreams.”

The former owners of our house told us that when they bought it, there was a heart-shaped hot tub in the master bedroom/bath. That was long gone, thankfully, when we moved in twelve years ago, but the neighbors on either side of us, original owners of their houses, are still here.

I met the neighbor to the left of us, first. She knocked on my door two or three weeks after we’d moved in, and didn’t waste any time with warm, fuzzy introductions. She informed me that my dog Lucky had gotten into her yard, several times.

I nodded and apologized. He was an escape artist, and could have easily jumped the four foot fence, or dug under it. I never got called by a principal about my kids, however, he had called me about my dog. They “saved” Lucky from the students at recess, and could I please come up and get him?

Within seconds, the neighbor lost my support when she added that Lucky had not only gotten into her yard, he had also taken her dog up to the school. In my mind I tried to picture him jumping into her yard, then jumping over the other side of the fence holding her dog in his mouth by the scruff of his neck, and leading him up to the school. Lucky was smart, but he just wasn’t organized or diabolical enough to come up with that complex of a plan. That’s when the Crazy Detector went off in my head.

She went on to tell me that she was a widow, the fence was falling down, and my husband needed to get out there and fix it. Sooo, she was nuts, and she thought she was the boss of my husband. I’m not the boss of my husband, so if she thought she could be the boss of him, good luck with that. I closed the door. So much for the welcome wagon.

I nicknamed her the witch because she looks like the wicked witch in Snow White, but with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth all the time. She has remarried, and cracks the whip on her poor slave handi-man of a husband. He’s constantly out in the yard doing repairs and adding more and more decorations to their yard while she supervises and calls him her first husband’s name.

The next house on the 180 degree tour, belongs to the mystery neighbors. We never see them. They must work some strange shift. Their dog has gotten into our yard a few times. He’s kind of mean, but at least he’s never taken our dog up to the school.

As soon as they moved in, the witch and her husband went over and cleaned up the new people’s backyard: cutting down trees and hauling yard waste out. The witch told John and Johnny all this as her husband helped them replace the fence on our shared property line five years after she demanded that John fix it.

The house next to that one is on its third set of residents since we’ve been here. It was a rental and the first renters were happy having a mud pit for a backyard. The second renters fixed it up, and eventually bought it.

The husband owned a landscape business, so they did a great job with their yard. The only problem was that he was overzealous with the blower. If a single leaf or pine needle landed on his deck, he cranked the blower up. He usually did this before he went to work, at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning, and on the weekends too. When his daughters became teenagers, he’d get up on the roof and blow it off at the crack of dawn. Maybe he was trying to wake them up creatively?

I’m not sure if he woke them up, but he regularly woke us up. One morning I stormed toward our back sliding door, pulling my robe on, to go out and yell at him. John pointed out that Blower Guy wouldn’t hear me over the blower. That sort of took the steam out of my wrath.

His most famous claim to fame in our house was that he was out there blowing one day in the middle of a 40-50 mph windstorm. Aren’t you supposed to clean up after the storm has passed? Was he trying to out-blow the storm?

They sold the house this summer and all I know about the new neighbors is that they had a wild “housewarming” party with loud music capped by a drunken guest screaming a 45-minute rant at 3:00 a.m. Someone must’ve said something because it’s been quiet over there since then. I’m pretty sure I know which neighbor did the complaining. She’s coming up.

The next neighbors, directly behind us, are the only normal ones: our friends Carol and Michael. Carol is the one who told me about our house when it was up for sale. We call our combined properties, in the middle of the wackos, “the compound.”

         There’s a gate in the fence between our two houses. Lots of good things have passed through that gate: kids on their way to and from school, baked goods and meals, fabric and quilting tools. We’ve kept an eye on each others' houses and pets when our families have gone on vacation, helped each other when we’ve locked ourselves out, and slipped through the gate for graduation parties or to just say “hi.”

The last house sharing a fence with us, in what is definitely not Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, is the neighbor to the right of us. She calls herself “Ms. Manorwood.” A divorced, and now-retired real estate agent, she’s the nosy, grouchy old lady of the neighborhood, and the self-appointed homeowner’s association police. She forced the former owners of our house out because they were running a daycare, and it was against the covenants.

She never gives out Halloween candy, or answers the door to children selling stuff for school. She has to mow her lawn or scoop her dog’s poop anytime we decide to barbecue or do anything out on our deck, especially if we have guests. Even though John has shoveled and sanded her driveway when it snowed, she doesn’t know our names, so she starts all conversations with us with, “Hi neighbor,” and then dives into some sort of scolding.

Most recently, she reported us to the police because Sarah K. parked her car facing the wrong way in front of our house. She parked that way because her car was broken and would only start when it was facing uphill. Ms. Manorwood couldn’t have any dis-order in her neighborhood.

Her Husky, Morgan, finds a way into our yard a few times a year. When she comes to get the dog, Morgan won’t go to her. Ms. Manorwood is always shocked that Morgan comes to me when I call her. That’s because Morgan is penned year round a few feet outside my kitchen window, and when she howls out of loneliness, I talk to her to calm her down.

We are the neutral zone between Ms. Manorwood and the witch who hate each other. We’ve gotten the dirt on each of them from the other one. 

The only positive thing Ms. Manorwood has ever done for us is to warn us about the witch’s son. He’s in his forties and a convicted felon and drug addict. He terrorized neighborhood kids as he was growing up and burglarized all the houses around here.

He and his alcoholic father fought all the time. The police were called regularly, I’m sure by Ms. Manorwood. One night when the cops showed up, the father was dead. The story is that in the heat of an argument, he had a heart attack.

        Ms. Manorwood told us that the felon has been in and out of jail. She assured us that whenever he got out, it wasn’t long before he’d offend again and go back in. He did show up one summer. He had a shaved head with a spiderweb tattooed on it. He was so pale, he kind of glowed in the darkness of the witch’s garage where he’d lurk while smoking.

The last time we saw him, he was spread eagle on the front of a cop car getting handcuffed. The rumor is that he’s in for life now—three strikes you’re out. We don’t miss the used needles he’d throw over the replaced fence into our yard.

As for fences, part of the fence shared with the mystery neighbors blew down last winter. We rigged it with ropes tying it up until we could fix it in the summer. Then we spent the summer trying to contact the mystery neighbors because their dog can be mean.

John and Johnny finally gave up and just started fixing the fence while keeping an eye out for the dog. One day they spotted a car in the driveway and knocked on the door. They were wearing their fence-fixing clothes, and heard the frightened voice of the daughter call out, “Dad! There are two men at the door!”

He answered the door holding a broomstick for a weapon. Once they explained who they were, he relaxed, and seems like a nice guy.

While the cement hardened around the fencepost on that side of the yard, Morgan showed up in our yard again. This time, when Ms. Manorwood came to get her, she told Johnny that the fence on her side of our yard was falling down.

He helped her tie it up until she can get it fixed. She told him that the original owners of our house had put up a fence between their yards, and that when they moved, they took the fence with them. But she didn’t tell him the whole story.

The witch had filled John in on the gaps in that story years ago. The original owner of our house asked Ms. Manorwood to split the cost of a fence between our houses. She refused, and gloated that she got a free fence. That’s why he took it down when he left, to spite her.

The broken part of the fence is fixed between us and the mystery neighbors. We’ll replace the rest in the summer. Mr. Mystery called to say he appreciated us fixing it and would like to split the cost of repairing it. I’ll give him a copy of our receipts today, and move him into the easy to deal with side of my neighbor list.

When I was young, and first read Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall, I agreed with him---

“There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines . . .

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’m older now and understand exactly what I’m walling in and walling out.  I’ve come around to agree with Frost’s neighbor, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Laura Keolanui Stark is just trying to live a quiet life on South Hill. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.