May 27, 2014. Stone Fences in Door County.

May 27, 2014.  Stone Fences in Door County (and an ugly, swollen, fourth toe).  Robert Frost is my favorite poet.  We have visited his "Stone House" in Vermont and the Frost Farm in New Hampshire.  Both help the reader to understand the poet.  In the Stone House, he wrote Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening early one morning after laboring the night away attempting to write lesser-known works.  The New Hampshire farm became his inspiration for Mending Wall.  The stone fences along College Row, just outside of downtown Fish Creek could have been his inspiration.  Here's the poem:

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 offence.

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."

Now, the unsightly toe; I put a two-liter bottle of Pepsi in the closet by the bed.  Somewhere along the way here, the bottle jostled loose from its very secure placement.  When Annie Farkley opened the closet door, guess what greeted the forth metatarsal of her right foot?  She says her toe is broken.  I say it is bruised.  It is her toe, so I guess she can call it anything she wishes.  However, a bruised toe by any other name is still a bruised toe.

Now, the worst of it is that she somehow blames me.  I did not smite her toe.  It was smitten by a gravity compelled object which became unsettled from the safe place in which I put it.  It could as easily have been her fault for opening the closet door without shoes to protect her toes from falling objects.  See my point?  On this we agree; her toe is painful and someone must be blamed.  There, the agreement stops.