I’ve been busy with fence-work the past several days: sorting sticks, cutting them to length, whittling down the ends of posts with a machete and, finally, lashing all of it together. The fence (aside from my expert labor) has cost almost nothing, which is good because we have almost nothing to spend. We’re happy, though, making something from the nothing we’ve got.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done fence work. I built bamboo fences in New Zealand, mostly as wind barriers, good old American (tall) fences, chicken fences and now, this. Every time I get to work on a fence I think about the adage Robert Frost made famous (”good fences make good neighbors”), which, I think, is mostly misinterpreted and misused as a sort of propaganda for the building of walls. With the mind of Frost (or at least the speaker in that poem), I’ve worked to build a fence that keeps our little one away from the street, but that does not keep the neighbors out. In fact, this fence doesn’t keep much of anything out. Not light, definitely not the deer—who wander tamely all through town—and certainly not people. No, it is more the idea of a barrier for dreamy little toddlers with an interest in roads.

Even though it is simple and small, I’ve felt rather exposed in my experiment. Every car that passes and every person walking or biking by seems to crane their heads around to look. Some say nothing, some seem to scoff, but at least half of them have made a point to stop and say how much they like it.

We plan to build an arbor over the front path and get some evergreen clematis growing along it soon. And while completion will be nice—especially when we can sit back and let River roam without having to chase him down every ten seconds—the work has been good and given me time to think about our new place. It may be early to say so, but this feels like the best place we’ve lived so far.