The Same Fence Twice
Nine years ago, I arrived home one afternoon and took a close look at the picket fence lining my front yard in Gilmanton. Though the fence was allegedly white, it was in fact gray. Situated on the side of a busy state highway, it was a haggard survivor of road salt and auto exhaust. Its pickets were tilting and rotting. I wanted to tear the fence down.
But 2015 was a pivotal year in my life. I was becoming a year-round Gilmanton resident. I was taking over a rambling, idiosyncratic circa 1790 farmhouse that my family had occupied, as summer people, for more than a century. Meanwhile, my mother was fading away, slowly and painfully succumbing to Parkinson’s, at a nursing home down in Connecticut, so that whenever I called to mind her long romantic link to the house–and considered, for example, the rhapsodic way she spoke of hearing rain on the roof as a small girl in the 1930s–I was rudderless and ensconced suddenly in a tumbrel of tears.
The fence had no practical purpose, but I could not bring myself to get rid of it. So I painted it that spring. I made it resplendent all over again, but even as I did that, I knew that entropy is one of life’s few guarantees–and that, in painting the fence, I was contracting myself to undertake future paintings.
Years passed. Then one morning this spring, I woke to discover that, once again, the fence looked like garbage. And this time I regarded the moss and grime on the pickets with a harder, more wizened eye. My mom’s been gone for over seven years now. Her passing is no longer fresh, and while the romance she carried still lives within me, the road salts of northern New England have been working away on my soul for nine winters.
It’s easy, when you’re a summer person, to think the Lakes Region of New Hampshire is nothing but fireflies and blueberries–that we inhabit an idyllic picket fence world. But in the time I’ve lived here, a certain grittiness has come to the fore. In the last nine years, our country has become more politically divided than it ever has been in my lifetime, and now tensions here play out at the micro level—in the way motorists yell at each other, heedlessly dropping F bombs, and at the way some neighbors in Gimanton despise one another. Often these days, I feel jaded, worn out.
So, a couple weeks ago, when a long bicycle ride took me past Pickett Fence Road in Meredith, I was aggrieved by a) the misspelling of “picket,” derived from the French word, piquet, for sharp stick; and b) the teeny-weeny pair of 10-foot long picket fence segments that flanked one driveway on Pickett Fence Lane, spotlessly white and perfect like a little wedding cake-ready scale replica of a picket fence. “That’s phony,” I thought to myself. “Life isn’t like that.”
But the irony is, I am the owner of a picket fence. And when I got home from my ride, I began painting. Or, rather, I embarked on the first stages of a multi-pronged campaign aimed at rejuvenating my aging and brittle fence. I called Colleen Colton and Omar Brissett, of Odd Jobs Are Our Jobs LLC, and enlisted them to paint the uphill half of my 91-foot, 143-picket fence. (Yes, I am both lazy and cheap.) Then I went to the lumber store and bought eight eight-foot lengths of pine, to saw into replacements for the fence’s 16 rotted pickets.
Colleen and Omar scraped and painted their half first. They did so quickly, with the panache of professionals, finishing in a little over a day. Afterwards, Colleen marveled over the fence’s rot and rough, paint-thirsty surface. She told me, “That fence kicked our ass.” Then, in a Facebook post about my fence, she wrote, “Today my body aches.” In tones more kind than critical, she added, “When we pulled up and looked at the fence, I thought, ‘Ugh, this fence clearly needs to be replaced.’”
When I finally bent to the ground and beheld the structural funkiness of the fence before me–a weird brace here; a corner wrought, seemingly, with random mismatching scrap wood–I thought of an observation that more than one editor has shared with me: Sometimes it’s best to just toss your first draft. Start anew, on a fresh page. What if I just tore the fence down and built a new one? It’d probably be simple as pie.
I didn’t tear the fence down, though. I kept working, amid trying circumstances. The downhill half of the fence is a lot worse than what lies above. There are large trees whose branches scratch your face as you scare. The pickets are more prone to rot, thanks, possibly to climate change. Torrential downpours have gushed sediment down the slope of my lawn and have, over the past 100-plus years, buried the fence’s lower reaches in dirt. I found many pickets planted a full inch deep in the soil, meaning that I needed to dig them out with a trowel, then jigsaw 1.5 inches off each picket’s base, to prevent rot from climbing upwards and into the wood.
I painted pickets so jaggedly shaped that I could all but see their sloppy carpenter, a beer in one hand, a saw in the other on a long forgotten summer afternoon. I scraped paint from hard-to-reach sections of wood with my fingernails, and I let my mind stray.
With so many of the material objects in our orbit these days, I thought to myself, we have a passing and indifferent connection. We purchase new shoes every few months, and we tend to buy ourselves a new car once every decade. Meanwhile, there are a few objects that we hang onto and care for.
What we save is arbitrary. After my mom died, there were several antique lamps here that I just gave away. But I saved the fence, deciding that, of all the old things on hand at my ancient house, this ragged array of pickets would stand for the love my mom felt for the place, as well as the love I still carry for her. The fence is for me a still point in a fraught world, and this has less to do with the fence itself than with my caring for it. Sawing, scraping painting—these are meditative exercises that can transport us into a mindset of peace and gratitude.
I kept working on the fence for several days–a quick painting session early each morning, another after work. After a total of about 20 hours crouching fenceside, I finished the second coat on the last picket. I got up off the ground, my knees a little creakier than they were nine years ago, and stepped inside to the kitchen. As I stood at the sink, scrubbing paint off my hands, I watched darkness fall on the fence. I've painted a large swathe of that thing three times now–in 1982, in 2015, and in 2024. Will I be painting that dilapidated fence again in 2032 or 2033?
Yeah, probably. Life winds on.
Bill? I enjoyed the Fence story it brought back memories of my encounter with fences, some good and some not
Some fences have eminent domain. One cannot remove them unless they have good cause. In fact some fences assume ownership of the land if not repaired or painted within the last ten years
The land owner needs permission to remove them so it appears you made a wise decision to repair and paint them.
The mention of your mother reflects the love you have for her Mothers are like that. I’m sure she approved of your decision to paint them Bless her!
Happy I have stone walls instead of the white picket fence I once envisioned, as did many girls in my generation. Stone walls age with beauty -- and if a boulder falls, there is no self shaming at this point in my life in seeking more muscular help. (Although I'd like it to be noted that I once did build stone walls 😊).