Fences (2020)

This is not my fence but I would like it to be

Along the southern wall of our garden was a fence, the travails of which I submit as parable for Our Times.

When we moved in a few years ago, the fence – more of a trellis if I'm being honest – was strong. It was implacable. Its protection needed no thought.

Yet the cruel winds pushed the fence this way and that. For many seasons it held fast, but bit by bit, it became loosened from the fixtures holding it to the stone wall behind. One morning, a whole section was detached and I proceeded with screwdriver to patch it up. But this was merely treating the symptoms, not the cause.

And so, gazing down from my study, I would stand up at ten minutes to the hour as commanded by Apple Watch and look down with furrowed brow to see the fence rattling sinusoidally. Again and again I would go forth to tend to it. The gap between my visits shrank from months to weeks to days, nearing an asymptote where I would be fixed in a loop, screwdriver clutched in fear and anger, like a low-budget Westworld.

To forestall this fate, I hauled every large stone and rock I could find, erecting a kind of levee against the foot of the fence, a rebuke against the cruelties of nature.

And yet not long after, a trio of storms descended upon the garden and dashed the fence cleanly over my levee. No mortal screwdriver could save it; its connection to the stone wall was irreversibly severed. I carried the fence in pieces, as one would a valued aegis broken in battle, to a place of honour next to the bike shed.

For many days I mourned, but there was a wall, and that wall need a new fence. Quotations were obtained and haggled over. Appointments were made, missed, and missed again.

Then word came of a virus, and a quarantine. The fence, once central in this man's life, receded. The stone wall looked pretty good without the fence, come to think of it.

And what matter that prying neighbours might think its absence unseemly? Such petty concerns could be met as with all things now: a shrug, and three words:

"It's the 'rona'."