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diff --git a/fence.txt b/fence.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e3766b7 --- /dev/null +++ b/fence.txt @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Fence Me In + +One of the first things I did after we bought our house was to extend the chain link fence that enclosed the back yard to also enclose the front yard. I've been having second thoughts ever since. + +I come from a place full of fences. Not little half height chain link fences like we have, but full six foot sealed privacy fences that encircle every property line. I assumed this was Just How It Was for a very long time. One of the big revelations of my life was coming east of the Mississippi River for the first time and realizing that in fact this was not just how it was. + +There is plenty of unfenced land out west, where I am from, far more than there is back here, east of the Mississippi where I know live. But that's open land. In the city and towns of the west, particularly southern California, the privacy fence is de riguer. + +As a child the privacy fence is a near absolute barrier. Sure, you can scale them, but they you're in someone else's property. I suspect that if you rounded up kids from where I grew up and surveyed them on attitudes toward open space and compared them with kids who grew up in places where the privacy fence was known only as a prop in bad sitcoms, you'd get some startlingly different outlooks on open space and live more generally. Where you can go affects your ability to conceive of where you can go. Which is to say the limits your immediate culture imposes on you run a very high risk of becoming your own -- that's what culture is and what acculturation is for. + +One of the things I really liked about Athens when I first came was that there are far fewer fences in general and almost no privacy fences. Or at least there didn't use to be. Now that I've been in this town off and on for nearly a decade and half now I'm starting to notice a change -- there are more fences. More shocking to me, the privacy fence cancer seems to be sweeping east. + +SO when I ran that chain link a sixty feet further around on two sides of my house I was worried that I might be contributing to the problem, inhibiting the cowpaths as it were. I have dog, so I've got excuses, but sometimes excuses are just that. + +Last week I, along with family and friends who pitched in, completed the fence around the front yard. + + |