Tag Archives: fences

Weekend Coffee Share 5/28/17

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If we were having coffee…

I’d offer you some cold brew out on the deck. We’re finally getting some sun and warmth and blue skies and flowers and singing birds. I love it!

Now that my kitchen is functional, I’ve turned my focus on the yard. I’ve started moving the seven cubic yards of wood chips from where they’ve been camped all winter just outside of my back yard gate. I need to clear access for the fence installers that are coming next week to set up a new fence along my back property line and replace the gate on the street side.

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Is it just me, or does this pile of wood chips resemble George Washington’s Mt Rushmore carving?

It will be a solid privacy fence. What’s that saying… “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Hold on… I want to look up who actually said that. Probably rude of me to hop on the computer while I have guests, but it will only take a sec.

Ah… Robert Frost. And it’s not a saying, it’s a line from a poem, Mending Wall. Interesting. I didn’t know that.

Frost writes about stones falling from the wall that separates his property from his neighbor’s. In the spring it’s time to mend the wall.

A few excerpts:

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go…

They work together until they come to the end of the wall.

There where it is we do not need the wall:
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.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

The poet presses the point:

“Why do they make good neighbors?
…
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…”

The neighbor continues working for a bit.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

You may read the entire poem here:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/mending-wall

*****
Sorry for the interruption of our coffee date, but I get curious about things. And I learned something new!

My neighbors and I don’t have apple trees and pine trees between us. They have an eclectic collection of – how shall I say this – crappy junk! I have daffodils, grape hyacinth, California poppies and St John’s wort.

Maybe they hate looking at my flowers as much as I hate seeing their junk. Who knows? But I’m so excited for the new fence! The installers will set the posts and show me how to put on the boards. It costs less if I do some of the work myself. And we all know how much I love to attempt new DIY projects.

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Maybe I’ll write my own poem about putting up my fence. Seriously. Okay, so I’m no Robert Frost, and my vinyl fence won’t be as picturesque as a countryside stone wall. But I’ll give it a shot. We all know how much I love to attempt poetry.

I guess I got a bit preoccupied today with fences and walls and neighbors and Robert Frost. And I’ve had too much caffeine now, so I’m antsy to get to work on… something. It won’t be shoveling wood chips today. It’s too hot. I have lots of projects to choose from, though.

Thanks for stopping by today. I hope you have a great week!

#WeekendCoffeeShare is graciously hosted by Emily at NerdintheBrain.com.  You can go there to check out what others are sharing over coffee this weekend. 

The Great Escape

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If only Leroy had distracted the guards a bit longer, they  would have made it over the fence to freedom.

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Leroy had warned them to wait for nightfall before storming the fence, but they didn’t listen.

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Leroy said the grass was greener on the other side, but some had been behind bars so long it had begun to grow on them.

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Leroy gave up on helping the captive trees and went back to the greener grass.

JNW’s Halloween Challenge: Forest/Plants

Let’s Go Literal

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I am literally challenged by this week’s Daily Press photo challenge. I am challenged by literalness.

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I grow uncomfortable around ambiguous phrases or terms, like questions that begin with “How do you like…” As in “How do you like your job?”

What is the actual question here? Is it like the phrase “How do you take your coffee?” I like my coffee with cream and sugar. I like my job with very little supervision and an extremely high salary. I seem to drink a lot of black coffee. Guess we don’t always get how we like.

But maybe the question simply means “Do you like your job?” In which case, the answer might be “yes” or “no.” But when “how” is tacked on at the beginning of the question, single-syllabic answers seem no longer appropriate.

In a question format, “how” becomes an adverb (I think; don’t quote me on that), which suddenly makes it all complicated with the need for nouns and adjectives and such.

“How do you like your job?”
“Yes.”
It just doesn’t work that way.

The Daily Post’s photo challenge theme this week is Grid. “We often superimpose a mental grid over things we photograph to help with composition,” the post begins. “This week, let’s go literal.” Michelle the Daily Post person suggests, “This week, let’s take the humble grid out of the shadows, and make it the star.”

Go literal? Suddenly I am compulsively pulling up dictionary.com to look up the literal meaning of “grid.” And since a “grid” is defined as a “grating,” I have to look up “grating,” as well.

This whole thing is, indeed, grating. On my nerves. Guess I’ll have to just grid and bear it. (Ahhhh, she breaks under pressure…)

Definition of “grating” and hence, by inference, also the definition of “grid” ~

a framework of parallel or crossed bars, used as a partition, guard, cover, or the like.*

*Emphasis mine. Mostly because I’ve always wanted to say “Emphasis mine.” **

** And also because I like to use asterisks.

After all this grate research, I have determined that my photos this week are in fact literal depictions of “or the like.”

How do you like them?

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