There was a chain link fence that ran around my property.  On one side lived the Hillmans, retired farmers.  Being quite a few years younger than them I always called them Mr. or Mrs. Hillman.  As much of being a term of respect it was also to hide the fact that I didn’t know for sure what Mrs. Hillman’s first name was.  It might have been Eva but I wanted to spare myself some embarrassment.  I did – for the seven years we lived next to one another I always called her Mrs. Hillman.  It went both ways, I was always Brittany to them. 

Because of Canada’s extraordinary long winters, spring was (and still is) a time to get reacquainted.  Mrs. Hillman was a superb gardener and would lean over the fence to let me know the names of mysterious perennials that would pop up from year to year.  She would point out pest plants and would look accusingly at my healthy, but seriously overgrown, daisies.  Since weeds were the things I grew best, I was reluctant to cut them back, even though they were stealthily trying to take command of her yard.  Mrs. Hillman, of course, grew everything well.  I believed she was the farmer that wrote the Farmer’s Almanac.

Mr. Hillman, or Art if you are a more informal and less easily embarrassed person, reminded me of the neighbour in Robert Frost’s popular poem “Mending Wall”.  He was a man of few words but what he said was worthy of remembering.  There is nothing I know today about being prepared instead of doing repairs that I don’t owe to him.  I try to apply his simple principle to my personal life as well as my electric lawn trimmer.

The fence, though, that was the important thing.  It kept my daisies from getting too wild and kept my kid’s soccer balls off of their perfectly manicured lawn.  The fence, too, kept them from coming over and moving the rake from the middle of the yard.  It kept the advice at just that; what they offered me I could leave at the fence.  There was too much of an age difference to pretend that we would ever be the best of friends but a formal relationship was made informal by the airiness of the chain link.  I agree, Mr. Frost, good fences do make good neighbours.