March 24, 2004

Boundaries

The lots on our hill tend to be pie-shaped or trapezoidal, narrowing near the top, fanning out down hill toward the street. The people who’ve lived up here for forty years plus never give that much thought. A yard is a yard is a yard.

It’s the new ones coming in and bringing with them a superfluity of surveyors to figure out these boundaries all over again once more, you’d think, for the first time. We long-timers are frequently surprised that a bush or a tree or a line itself isn’t where we thought it was all along. It never made any difference before. We just enjoyed it or hated it together.

When these changes come along, you’d think it only a minor kind of getting-used-to, that everything would settle down sooner or later. Not so. There’s a new neighbor, a medical school faculty doc than-which-there-is-often-no-whicher, who’s got big dogs, so he’s built an eight-foot fence around his back yard. The widow next door has lived there longer than the doc on this planet. She was naturally curious and wondered out loud about a couple of bushes she’d grown fond of over the years suddenly having been uprooted by the fencers and carted off to the trash. The doc got in a huff and called her “devious.” It hurt her feelings.

And we wonder why the United Nations doesn’t work.

No Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.