What fences teach us.

We live in a typical Phoenix house with a typical six-foot-high cinder block fence that serves largely as an outer perimeter to our fortified family compound. On the massive, steel-framed gate, we have a padlock so that bad guys can’t easily come in and overactive boys can’t escape.

In St. Louis, our back yard was on two sides a four-foot wooden slat fence and on the third side chain-link, almost barbarically permeable to air, bugs, and eyes. On the gate, we never installed a lock. It never seemed necessary. Kids freely left and neighbors entered, and a lock would have just be a nuisance.

Is there a difference between the people of the Midwest and those of the Southwest? I’m reluctant to draw sweeping implications, but isn’t it naïve to ignore the influence such architectural differences can have on how we feel about our neighbors; whether they should be trusted…or feared? And doesn’t believing such tutelage eventually form us (and our children) into a particular sort of people?

Postscript: In The Mending Wall, Robert Frost did indeed say, “Good fences make good neighbours.” But this was carefully placed in the mouth of a neighbor who clearly did not grasp the point of Frost’s poem.