jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

White picket fences used to be a sign of Americana, but you don't see them any more. We had one when I was a kid. How about you?

foodie65

No fence, just hedges.
Happy Thanksgiving!!

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I see lots of hedges and the occasional stone wall.

foodie65

Not many hedges here but we do see the old stone walls.

Beowulf Loc: Aquidneck Island, RI

Jerry,
I grew up on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island where there are plenty of stone walls, hedges, and picket fences still in evidence. Lived in Georgia and North Carolina for just six of my 74 years a few years back and despite some intra-state travel in both, we did not see too many of the fences or stone walls. Hedges were commonplace.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

The stone walls rely on having lots of stone in the soil. In my area, you can't stick a shovel in the ground without hitting a rick, possibly three feet across. You see stone walls all over the place, even running through vacant woods. I always wonder who put them there, when, and why.

The other types of stone walls we have around here are purposely built and often involve no mortar. It's a real art to build them, as all the pieces must fir together perfectly.

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Having to scrape the peeling paint and repainting every few years kinda spelt their end.

u02bnpx Loc: NW PA

Your American Lit. 101 reading assignment for the day:

Mending Wall - Poem by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour 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.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
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 neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
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 offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
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 neighbours."

Robert Frost

1Feathercrest Loc: NEPA

Those vacant woods were once tilled lands, long abandoned and now grown over.

2Dragons Loc: The Back of Beyond

One of my favorite poems by Frost. Also like Frost's, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Eve.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Right, generations ago. There's a heavily-wood lot near me, and I can remember when it was just grass. I used to ride a snowmobile there in the early 1970s.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I thought I made a similar post about that poem, but it isn't here. I also like "The First Snowfall," by Lowell.

FrankR Loc: NYC

Alway's been a "Cliff Dweller," not to many pocket fences in Brooklyn or Manhattan.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Maybe picket fences have been outlawed because the danger of people becoming impaled on them.

2Dragons Loc: The Back of Beyond

I'd never read that one, so I looked it up online and read it, and then read some of the opinions on the poem. Personally, I thought it was a lovely, poignant
poem, that some critics found too syrupy. Apparently, they did not bother to find out more about the author. It seems that he had 4 children, Blanche, Rose,
Mabel, and Walter. Mabel was the only one who survived beyond the age of 2, so the poem was written about one of the other daughters who had died.
I guess I'm just not intellectual enough to appreciate poems that I have to strain my limited brain matter to its limits to understand what the devil the author is writing
about. I much prefer the plain speaking poets like Frost and Lowell who write in a manner in which their narratives are clear to their readers. Abstract
poems leave me about as cold as abstract paintings. Neither stirs the senses. Thanks for sharing the reference to "The First Snowfall".