Woodburn: Social distancing makes good neighbors
Freshman year in college, to fill an English requirement I got stuck in a class I had no desire to take. What a lucky break.
“The Poetry of Robert Frost” proved to be my favorite class of all four years. Partly it was the professor; largely it was the wordsmithery of the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
I recently retrieved Frost’s complete and unabridged works from my bookcase because, probably like you, I have extra time on my hands during these COVID-19 days and nights of self-isolation.
While “The Road Not Taken” remains my favorite Frost masterpiece, the poem I had foremost in mind to reread was “Mending Wall” with the closing line: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
One interpretation of the poem is that a wall, or stone fence between farms, is good because it separates people and livestock.
More Woodburn:
Teacher Appreciation Day comes early
Readers share ‘pajama sunrises’ and more
The following lines, however, offer a wink towards an opposite interpretation as the narrator notes of his neighbor beyond the hill: “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.”
Frost is playfully observing that apple and pine trees do not need a wall to keep them apart.
Shortly thereafter, the narrator continues: “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 offense.”
Here especially “Mending Wall” seems powerfully pertinent today. Through social distancing and self-isolation we are all being asked to build fences between ourselves and fellow citizens.
A week ago, not greeting a neighbor or friend with a handshake or hug felt rude because they were “like to give offense.” Similarly, by self-quarantining were we walling coronavirus out or walling ourselves in?
The important truth, we now know, is that we are using a metaphoric wall to “flatten the curve” of infections in an attempt to prevent our healthcare system from being overwhelmed.
Some people, for the good of all, must breach the wall — healthcare professionals, truckers, grocery and pharmacy workers, for example. Others need to go over the shelter-in-place wall to seek medical care, buy food, help at-risk neighbors.
It makes the news and goes viral on social media when selfish boors hoard toilet paper and fight over hand sanitizer, but I remain convinced most people share, give, help.
My friend Dave told me a story that I like to think is the Dog-Bites-Man non-headline norm. An elderly couple in their 80s sat in their car in a supermarket parking lot for 45 minutes, afraid to go inside and risk getting COVID-19.
Finally, they worked up the courage to ask a stranger to do their shopping. A young woman passerby gladly took their grocery list and money. She returned and set down the bags — and change — outside their car.
This suggests to me a new 2020 interpretation for “Mending Wall” with the narrator being a young, healthy farmer while his neighbor is in a vulnerable group — perhaps over age 65, or has a compromised immune system, or has asthma.
For the neighbor, balancing the “boulders that have fallen to each / And some are loaves and some so nearly balls” back in place on the wall is potentially life-saving.
If we view the mended wall as a metaphor for serious social distancing, it is indeed true that “Good fences make good neighbors” — at least for now.
The day will eventually return when it is more neighborly to shake hands across the fence. Or, better yet, hop over it and embrace.
Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.