Mending Wall(s)

Mr. Frost relates that “Some­thing there is that doesn’t love a wall” and the con­trary opin­ion, “Good fences make good neigh­bors,” in his poem Mend­ing Wall– it seems to be frost heaves and win­ter and grav­ity, the upheavals of win­ter, weather and cows.  He talks not of insid­i­ous creep­ers like ivy or bit­ter­sweet vine that grows thick and wild in the wood and with its gor­geous color and tap­roots digs into stone and cement and tears things apart, instead talks about things seen such as Hunters and unseen like Elves that his more prac­ti­cal neigh­bor is unlikely to humor.

The poem, on its face, is about their once-a-year meet­ing and mend­ing of stones that have fallen over the win­ter from sources known and unknown, how they nearly need magic and have to work hard and closely together to get it all bal­anced between them again.  Frost’s char­ac­ter won­ders at the old-fashioned stolid­ness of his neighbor–

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’.

and then

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.’

before his final reflection:

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.”

I used to agree with Frost’s mis­chief, because wouldn’t you want to be open to peo­ple, as open as pos­si­ble? Now I think more like the neigh­bor– ironic in a woman who keeps a blog and bares large parts of her life open to stranger as the only real means she has of real self-reflection.  And yet.   There are things I don’t share, and bound­aries I am try­ing to repair.

I’ve been think­ing about energy con­ser­va­tion and bound­aries and walls of the per­sonal type, namely those of time spent with fam­ily and friends.  How much is enough?  How much becomes too much?  I have always been a per­son who lives too much in my head, and clearly too much intro­spec­tion is quite bad for me, but at the same time, I have a ten­dency to be socially anx­ious and awk­ward (when I’m not being hypo­manic and there­fore incred­i­bly funny and witty and charm­ing and ON, which in itself is a bit of an iden­tity cri­sis, because I know it’s not my default state, so hey, yeah, no, I’m not really that funny all of the time.)  I’ve been feel­ing much bet­ter from my most recent crash and resur­gence, but work­ing retail’s exhaust­ing and I’m often sub­ver­bal when I come home at the end of the day and I don’t always have two days off in a row.  It leaves me one day to myself, often taken up with errands and doctor’s appoint­ments.  Spend it with friends?  Or take that time to myself?

And if I spend it with friends?  I feel guilty, only see­ing them for two or three hours, but still– I get tired.  Over­stim­u­lated, exhausted and all-of-a-sudden-bratty-short-tempered even when I’m with just one per­son, because it’s a lot of focus to pay all that atten­tion to some­one else still at this time– and the fact is, I’m still not quite myself.  I’m still rebuild­ing all my social mus­cles.  It’s good to get out, to see peo­ple, to get re-acquainted, to re-make con­nec­tions, to decide even whether to keep them, because peo­ple do change and good­ness knows that I am chang­ing each day, but still– I am try­ing to be care­ful, to bal­ance those stones on the wall so they don’t fall imme­di­ately over.

So yes– there is some­thing in me that doesn’t love a wall, because part of me would love to have all the energy in the world to spend all day with you and more, to laugh and hang out and chat and do what­ever you want– but part of me still needs to wall myself in, wall out all your well-meaning ques­tions and needs, because, well– I’m still tired and frag­ile and I am not yet ready for a whole day of walk­ing the prop­erty lines, talk­ing of hunters and elves and agree­ing with you that yes, there is noth­ing there to take offence at, and if even you did have cows, they could roam at will.

Every­day truth, though, is never so sim­ple, and that bit­ter­sweet vine is a pain to pull out if your wall’s not care­fully tended– even if it is pretty to con­tem­plate as you sit all alone in your hut in the fall, watch­ing it blos­som and grow.  Leav­ing it there all on its own ’til the spring will only bring trouble.

–

Unre­lated and yet not:  This arti­cle in yesterday’s NYT about cen­sor­ing your own life online.