"I was irked 30 years ago when our neighbor said she intended to install a free-standing fence between our driveways...."

Writes Margaret Renkl, in "What if Robert Frost’s Neighbor Was Right?" (NYT)(free-access link, the first of the 10 allotted to me in June).

By the time she died two years ago, the unbeloved fence had become the scaffolding for pokeweed and native vines.... The fence had been built in a shadowbox style, and the gaps between the boards gave reaching vines room for twisting.... After our neighbor passed, a developer bought her modest, meticulously maintained house and reduced it to rubble.... The new fence sits on top of a concrete wall.... Unlike the old shadowbox fence, this new fence has a front side and a back side, and it’s the back side that faces us. Worse, its unbroken expanse gives climbing vines no purchase. It took 30 years for the realization to dawn, but once the new flat-board fence went up, I finally understood that my late neighbor had gone to some expense to make the fence she built as attractive on our side as on hers. This choice was her version of neighborliness. I was just too caught up in my own contrary definition of neighborliness to see it....

You can listen to Frost reading his poem, "Mending Wall," here. And here's the text of the poem, which is not entirely about the literal wall. The NYT essay is about a fence. It's quite literal. Renkl has a lot of feelings about fences and neighbors — different kinds of fences and different kinds of neighbors. Do you have neighbors who bring up Trump when you thought you were just talking about your gardens? Well, let me assure you, the NYT essayist does not bring up Trump. It's lovely, all that wall wall wall and never a peep about Trump's wall. Yes, I know, I'm bad to bring it up. But how can you talk about not bringing something up without bringing it up.

"I just feel like there must’ve been a time when the world had more, you know? Like mystery or something."

"And now you come somewhere like this, and it’s beautiful, and you take a picture, and then you realize that everybody’s taking that exact same picture from that exact same spot and you’ve just made some redundant content for stupid Instagram."

Said my favorite "White Lotus/Season 2" character, Portia, quoted in "How to Redeem Social Media in One Easy Step" by Margaret Renkl (NYT). 

Renkl bemoans the bane of social-media-driven photography:

My son and daughter-in-law, who are frequent campers, have seen people queued up at least 50 deep to take phone selfies at popular national park waterfalls and rock formations.... 

"Thirty years ago my husband... said, 'If the cat needs something that costs more than a hundred dollars, I say we opt for the $40 shot and go get a new cat.'"

"It was my cat, so my vote counted more than his did, and the cat lived to a ripe old age. But in my husband’s defense I should mention that his formative years were spent in the small-town South, where humane people went out in the yard and shot an animal if it was suffering.... My husband would have found it impossible to believe that 30 years later he would be running around the house in his boxers, trying to tackle an ancient 70-pound mutt in the dark and shove a pill down his throat. Clark is also deaf, and he suffers from crippling arthritis. So far we have been able to manage his pain with medication, but at his checkup last year, when he turned 13, the vet had some sobering news. 'With big dogs, there’s often a huge difference between 12 and 13,' he said. 'One day Clark won’t be able to get up, and when that happens it’ll be time to let him go.' The very idea is unthinkable...."

From "The Pain of Loving Old Dogs" by Margaret Renkl (NYT).

(Note that the title has 2 meanings. The obvious meaning is that the loving is painful for the human being. The secondary meaning, probably intended, is that the loving dog experiences pain.)