Heavy

Stone walls are very popular in New Hampshire. Years ago they marked property lines. This one appears to be pretty recent and built by hand. Many heavy boulders carried and piled.

It reminded me of the Robert Frost poem Mending Walls. It's about two neighbors walking the stone wall that borders their property in the spring to make the regular repairs to stones having fallen out during hunting or winter or just shift. The speaker doesn't understand why they need the wall as there are no cows to keep in or out, just a pine forest on one side and an apple orchard on the other. The neighbor says that "Good fences make good neighbors", setting boundaries of sorts and repeats that again later in the poem. It seems that Frost is questioning If he really believes it or is parroting a mentality from another era. Yet they persist year after year rebuilding the wall. It seems these men push boulders back on top of the wall; yet just as inevitably, whether at the hand of hunters or the forces of nature, the boulders tumble down again. Still, the neighbors persist. The poem, therefore, seems to operate on three grand themes: barrier-building (segregation, in the broadest sense of the word), the doomed nature of this enterprise, and our persistence in this activity regardless. If you care to read the whole poem, you can find it HERE.

I'm not sure how I caught the diverging beams of light, probably something I did very technically wrong, but I liked the effect. Divergent beliefs and yet communal wall building.

DDWOCTOBER 2013