Good Fences, Good Neighbors.

Good fences make good neighbors. Miss Cindy (I never knew her last name), was working in her carefully-tended garden one day when she felt as though somebody was watching her. Looking up, she saw that one of the slats on her fence had fallen. In its place were three little heads, one on top of the other. Me, my brother, and my sister.

Miss Cindy didn't have any children. She wasn't married, either, even though she was at least as old as my mom was. Her backyard was beautiful. Flowers and green grass and carefully arranged stones and a birdbath and even a little fountain (although I may be misremembering the fountain). Our yard had the big mud puddle and the little mud puddle and the climbing tree and rocks that were constantly being turned over for the insects and arachnids and beetles and worms and larvae and pillbugs (not! rolly-polies!), underneath them. My mom told us not to bother Miss Cindy, that you don't go into neighbor's yards without permission, and also that it's rude to stare at people. The slat was propped back up in the fence, but Miss Cindy told us that if we ever needed to slip through the hole to retrieve a ball or frisbee, that was okay. So we did, and if perhaps we aimed over the fence a bit more often than we had to, she never commented on it. Miss Cindy's backyard became a treasured place, to creep in and look, but not touch, to never catch anything in, to be careful of the flowers and grass and rocks, a garden, not a yard. When I was old enough to read "The Secret Garden," I pictured Miss Cindy's yard.

It couldn't last, of course. We knew from the beginning that our excursions were, if not illicit, at least unorthodox. The fact that Miss Cindy didn't seem to mind didn't change the fact that we were technically trespassing every time we crept through the hole in the fence, and eventually a heavy thunderstorm meant things had to change.

The wood was old, the nails rusted, and now there was a visible sag along its whole length. The fence had to be replaced, Miss Cindy decided, and we were warned sternly away from the work area as orange netting went up and mysterious men came and went with nails and wood and shovels and saws. We understood, but at the same time there was something sad about losing the little hole in the fence.

Miss Cindy had tolerated our little incursions for long enough. She had been very polite and much nicer than we deserved, but good fences make good neighbors. So the new fence went up, golden-colored with freshly-sawed wood where the soft and tired old gray fence had been. My siblings and I raced along it, examining each new slat for little loose knots that could be pushed out from the rest of the wood by small fingers. Then we got to the spot where our hole had been.

When you contract somebody to build something for you, like a bathroom or a porch or a fence, it isn't like buying something from the grocery store. You can ask them to change something for you, something that they wouldn't normally do. Like when you don't like tomatoes, so you get all of your hamburgers with "hold the tomatoes." Miss Cindy had known this, and so when she called the fence guys to ask for a new fence, she had asked them to change something for her.

She had asked them to put two of the slats on hinges.

Good fences make good neighbors. Or is it that good neighbors make good fences?