Depending On The Mending Wall

The boundaries we bump, and the ones we build.

[Unobstructed Issue No. 064]
I’ve been writing a lot lately and I’m feeling called to share more of it.

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I was startled more than anything.

The coffee maker gurgled, its heat reaching my ears through a series of spits and hisses. My phone lay open, face up and unlocked on the counter.

"Did he just say what I thought he did?"

Tapping the button to rewind 15 seconds confirmed it. Dan Harris had just referenced The Red Wheelbarrow, a very literal poem about very big ideas.

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The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

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But that wasn't what surprised me.

Sliding my speckled, ceramic mug closer, I kept listening to his conversation with Rich Roll through my headphones.

I poured the coffee, and my brain left the kitchen. It arrived, unexpectedly, in my high school English classroom. Now, mixed in with the earthly aromas of a Costa Rican medium roast, was the mildewy scent of a New England high school.

Where Dan was talking about the white chickens beside the red wheelbarrow, my mind was envisioning the whiteboard beside the red brick wall.

That's when I remembered a very abstract poem about reinforcing division.

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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.’

---

With a slurp of scalding coffee, I winced as I recalled the toughest English teacher I’d ever had.

And as the heat on the back of my tongue subsided, I wondered what it'd have been like if she'd known the truth about my situation at home.

That was a turning point for me.

I even tried to tell her once. Well, kinda... I'd never told anyone before and she’d cut me off before I could actually get it out. She never tried to hide the judgements she’d held about me. So I'd retreated.

"Good fences make good neighbors”, she’d even recited—using Frost’s words to express her desire of keeping distance from me.

My homework was late a lot that year. And it was often absent altogether. My contributions in class had earned me the label of “capable”, which meant she’d decided my distraction was disinterest.

It wasn’t.

I became a writer to mend the wall.

Now back in my kitchen, I grinned as I strolled toward the window. The fragmented, early morning light poured through—slipping and sliding between the cracks in the trees from beyond.

Sitting down at my desk, it dawned on me: it was in writing that I began to question what I was “walling in or walling out.”

My English teacher had judged me based on what I'd chosen to show her—what I’d pinned on the exterior wall of myself… how could I blame her? It's what we all do; by design or by response. And, often, both. Who’s to blame is a question of the chicken or the egg.

It’s important to remember we can’t see the whole story.

When our only connection is through mending our side of the wall, we don't get the full picture of what's behind their boundary. Except through the windows they open.

We don’t need to know all of what’s kept on their side. But reconvening to mend the wall is itself an act of connection.

Frost describes it like this.

“And on a day we meet to walk the line;
And set the wall between us once again."

So when Dan Harris referenced The Red Wheelbarrow in a podcast conversation with Rich Roll, I was gifted a moment of reflection. And over coffee, no less—looking through the glass at the morning light.

Holding the words of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost in hand, I sifted through a newly formed understanding of a lesson learned long-ago.

Now, I see their words intertwined.

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Depending On The Mending Wall
by Derek MacDonald

So much depends
upon

a speckled ceramic
mug

Splashed with dark
coffee

beside the paned
window

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A quick note.

Posts like these won’t replace the Sunday newsletter or Wednesday podcast. They’ll just be an extra slice of Unobstructed for you. But, more bite sized—bits from a journal rather than chapters from a book… Yeah?

onward.

-dmac

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