Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

“Good fences make good neighbors.” – Robert Frost, Mending Wall

This quote makes me think back to my time growing up in a rowhome in Southwest Philadelphia. Now, if you’ve never been introduced to rowhomes, let me tell you, they have nothing to do with rowing, or the water, or anything like that. They’re named thusly because they’re arranged in a solid row, so that one block is really one really long house, separated by walls between individual domiciles. So, you are always sharing at least one wall with your next-door neighbor, and most times at least two walls, one with the neighbor on your left, and the other with the neighbor to your right.

I remember being awakened in the middle of the night because our neighbor was having an impromptu midnight party, and I had school the next day. It wasn’t fun. Or when the neighbors would pound on the wall when they were upset, or the banging of their headboard against the wall for a completely different reason. We always knew what was happening with them, and they always knew what was happening with us, because those walls were thin, thin enough to tell secrets.

One of the unspoken tenets of living in a rowhome is that you don’t share those secrets with others. In fact, you don’t ever even tell your next-door neighbors that you know their secrets. While that was understood, so was the rule that you never speak of it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t do something about it. I remember once I had heard through the walls our neighbor’s son crying because he had broken his Atari game system. Well, we had a new Apple 2C computer with the Oregon Trail software on it, so my mother invited him over to play with us. We didn’t talk about his system breaking, or even about his tears, even though we both knew it had happened. We only enjoyed each other’s company.

In a way, those walls acted like the fences in Frost’s poem, but with a city feel. The walls, while obtrusive, were also what kept us together as a community. Yes, we were upset that others could hear us, but it was because others could hear us that we stayed connected, even if no one ever talked about it. It was that feeling, that sense of communal living, that feeling that someone understood what you were going through, because they did.

And on some level, I miss those walls, and that sense of community. Because good fences really do make good neighbors.

Sam