mulberry

“Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote Robert Frost in “Mending Wall.” For the last fifteen years, I’ve had a number of occasions to wonder about the contrapositive: do bad fences make bad neighbors? Signs point to yes.

There’s a beaten-up section of chain link fencing that separates my backyard from my neighbor to the south, with whom we’ve had nothing but trouble since literally the day before we moved in. When I came to do the final walkthrough before the closing the next day, she was out gardening. We made some small talk, during which she suddenly launched into a bitter tirade about the family selling the house we were buying. She hated them, and had no problem telling me, a perfect stranger and her new neighbor, all about it. Among her litany of complaints was that he was a musician. He had parties! And sometimes he played music! I mean, what could be worse? I knew I was in for it.

There’s no need to rehash all her crimes here and now. Suffice it to say our relationship deteriorated to open, hostile conflict less than a year later when Danny, about 7 at the time, and a friend went into her yard to fetch a wayward basketball. The boys inadvertently stepped on some flowers, and minutes later she and her on-again-off-again husband were on my porch, rage-screaming at me while I had fifty guests at my house for a barbecue. Unhinged. There have been numerous other incidents since, including a few where law enforcement were engaged.¹ We don’t speak at all, now, though if we did, I’d ask her whatever happened to their older son, who we haven’t seen in a few years. He’d be about 14 or 15. The most charitable take is that he’s away at some boarding school, though darker possibilities have crossed my mind, too.

Anyway, in contrast to the rest of their otherwise well-kept yard, all sorts of weeds grow tall and thick along her side of that fence line in the back. None of them appear to have been intentionally planted there. There are some actual scrubby trees, surely volunteers, trying to make their way through the noise. I recognize oak and maple leaves, a tree of heaven (yuck), and a mulberry among the rest of the weedy/scrubby stuff. It’s all a bit unsightly, but by this point in the summer, they’ve grown in thick and tall enough to provide a full visual barrier between my yard and hers. We keep the vertical face of the weedwall well trimmed on our side of the fence, as is our right, and she either doesn’t care or doesn’t know. Other than the randomness and scraggly top line, it doesn’t look terrible, and it serves a valuable purpose: obscuring the horror I live next to.

About two weeks ago after trimming back our side, the inner branches of that mulberry were exposed, and the result has been a real treat for me as I sit here in my office. It’s immediately outside my window to the right here, and those now revealed mulberries, so red they’re almost black, proved to be irresistible to the local wildlife community. The cardinals spotted them first, and the flash of bright red in my periphery never failed to steal my full attention from whatever I was supposed to be working on in front of me. Soon after, the robins and sparrows came along, keeping the more skittish cards away. And when the birds weren’t around, the chipmunks were. Now that Arlee’s not around to keep the population in check, our yard teems with them.² I even saw squirrels in there a few times, which was usually quite hilarious, given that around here they’re all the size of small cats, and those rubbery branches couldn’t really support them. Chaotic and playful, constant motion, noisy chatter, and bright colors. We take our moments with nature in these manicured suburbs where we find them.

But like everything my neighbor touches, that little bit of entertainment has now been sucked joyless, too. Yesterday she had her landscapers out and they cut that entire line of weeds and wannabe trees down to about eight feet in height. They cut that mulberry back aggressively at the trunk; now the berry branches are all gone, and of course so are the critters. The other weeds are still thick enough to provide a visual barrier, and for that I’m grateful, but now the scene is quiet and still. And from the looks of that stump—still wet with sap, as the roots haven’t gotten the memo that the tree above is gone—likely to stay that way.