Dad by Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” – the mending wall referred to in poem, 1991, Robert Frost Farm, Derry, N.H.
As Robert Frost ponders in his poem “Mending Wall” (poem is included at end of post for reference), “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”. In the swirling patterns of disorder and chaos characteristic of this summer, my parent’s fence began to buckle and fall over in the front. Dad’s heroic efforts over the years to keep it upright began to fail in August.
Weighted down with grief and newfound caretaker responsibilities for my childhood home, I consulted with the neighbour.
The neighbour, unlike Frost’s neighbour, was none to keen to assist with the challenge despite a collapse over winter seeming imminent. Time to implement Plan B.
Disclaimer: I am no handyman, with limited time, tools, and resources. But armed with fence post stabilizers from Amazon, a rubber mallet, and stubborn determination, I was ready to take on the challenge of time and decay.
Above, the fence in question, in imminent danger of collapse.
And so, with assistance to hold the fence upright, I set to work, hammering the steel post into the ground.
Bang. Why was the fence made so poorly. Bang. Dad did a beautiful job painting it a few years ago. Bang. Why did the neighbour put their wooden frame vegetable garden so close the fence can no longer be fully upright? Bang. Winter is coming. Bang. Ladybugs everywhere, this is disgusting. Bang. Why did he have to die. Bang. Why. Bang. He deserved so much better. Bang. We deserve better. Bang.
I channeled my fury at how my life has gone, rage at the health system, anger at… everything. Kneeling on the lawn on a Sunday morning, the morning of Thanksgiving, when there would be no get togethers for us. No coming in the door to the delicious smells of dinner on the stove, no laughter over Dad stealing the dill pickles as we tried to cut them for guests, no Dad asking Mom for a five minute warning for dinner to be served so he could properly dispense the wine he’d purchased. Just shadows and a fence, and me trying to prop up my life- our lives- trying to keep things moving forward and safe from a constant threat of chaos and despair.
Above, the fence and three posts, properly reinforced.
The middle post is unable to stand entirely straight due to the thoughtless neighbour’s raised garden built too close behind, but nevertheless the post is vertical again, and strong enough to withstand the winter’s bitter north winds. I hope I remain so, too.
***
Robert Frost’s poem, of course, has much depth and complexity to it. Like so many great pieces of art, as you approach the work at different stages of your life, different meanings refract back. At this stage in my life, for example, I was considering the walls I need to build up to endure attending work, and sorting out the estate, through my grief, as well political polarizations playing out on the broader international word stage.
This past February, 2024, Dad took a revisit into Frost’s work, recording favourite poems on a CD. https://tothineownselfbetrue.ca/2024/02/14/another-day-another-cd-project/. Some of Dad’s reflections during this February recording are below:
“Frost was actually the first major poet I encountered in any depth back in grade 11, fall of 1965: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “After Apple Picking”, “Birches”, and “The Road Not Taken”. What appealed to me back then was his descriptions of Nature and he interwove delight and wisdom into each work; I grew up close to Nature in the Winnipeg outskirts so his speakers and situations were easy to identify with.
I returned to him and his work back in 1991 and 1993 on two fall literary wonder-tours of New England. My wife and I visited his Derry, N.H. farm, his Franconia, N.H. homestead, his grave in Bennington, Vt., and the hotel where he often stayed at in Amherst, Mass. when teaching or reading at Amherst College.
Reading his poems aloud at 74, I found many nuances I was not previously aware of. Looking back, he remains my favorite American poet.”
A link to Dad’s reading of Mending Wall (audio only) from February 2024 is here: https://youtu.be/uqxuzqdDrBo
***
Mending Wall
By Robert Frost
Something 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 a 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 out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
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, 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 offense.
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.’