March 25, 2008
Boundaries
The lots on our hill tend to be more or less trapezoidal, narrowing near the top, fanning out down toward the street. The people who’ve lived up here for forty years or even more never give that much thought. A yard is a yard is a yard.
Not so with the newer residents bringing with them a superfluity of surveyors to figure out the boundaries all over again, you’d think sometimes for the first time. So we’re 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 ignored 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. One of our newer neighbors, a medical school faculty doc than-which-there-is-often-no-whicher, has got big dogs. So he’s built an eight-foot fence around his back yard. The woman next door has lived there longer than the doc has on this planet. She was naturally curious and wondered out loud one day 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.
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