Stonewalls

 

Before Covid struck us, Rick and I drove around Lexington and Concord, half my heritage and my old stomping ground. 

I loved the old Colonial homes with the dates over the entry -- from 1750 on. We passed the houses of Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thorough (cabin), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I'd read their essays, books and poems.

I loved the Transcendentalism philosophy, but that was when I still believed in the American myth.

There were the stonewalls everywhere. Growing up on 14 acres of land, our property was surrounded by a stone wall, that probably had been there from before the house was built in the early 1900s. One section was in front of a blueberry patch. Many of the blueberries ended up in homemade ice cream. We picked the blueberries with an eye on the wall. More than once we'd seen a snake peek from the rocks or bask in the sun. Is that analogy of current life?

Lately, as I watch the destruction of my birth country, the myth that I knew was a myth moves away from ever becoming a possibility shoveled under the dirt of hate, lies, power-hungry individuals and ignorance, I wish I could build a stonewall around myself keeping inside the transcendentalists beliefs of goodness and the simplicity I seek in my life. 

I'd let in friends and family, good food, books, art, creativity, people who don't lie and cheat. I'd shut out all the bad that is happening.

Of course, that is impossible. It is necessary to accept the world as it is.

Maybe it's age. I no longer have the strength to fight as I used to. I would have loved to be at the demonstration in front of the NRA meeting in Houston, but an overseas flight is too much. I still send copies of my Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles to pro-life people, but there is an ever-growing sense no matter what I do, what the good guys do, knowing it is useless. As an Ex-American I can no longer call congressmen and women and say "I'm an expat and I vote."

So I alternate between watching the collapse of the country whose dream was beautiful into a nightmare reality and trying to shut out the events by concentrating on the good things around me and sealing them behind a stonewall. And then I realize, stonewalls aren't that high. They don't make good neighbors no matter what the poem says.

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.’