When is a fence not just a fence?

The perils of open-heartedness

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They smelled even better than they looked, like leather and spice and life and sex.

Any of y’all that have been around here for a minute know I love a boundary. Boundaries, judiciously applied and faithfully maintained, are what give us the space to be as open-hearted as we want to be in this world. As author/activist/sage Prentiss Hemphill teaches us, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

A fence is just a boundary in its most concrete form, right? Sure. It’s also more than that. But let me back up for a minute…

See those gorgeous peonies up there? I planted those two years ago in front of my house and now they are almost obscene in their lushness. So many petals! Such redolence! And these particular beauties match the color of my living room, an electric magenta that calls to mind spring and life and lady parts. I love them madly.

Last year, the first spring after I planted them, they leafed out but didn’t bloom. I can wait, I thought. This year there were big, fat buds and I thought, Here we go! Then, a few nights ago, I went out after work to check on them to find they had opened in the long overdue sunshine. I stuffed my face inside them, as you should, inhaling their scent deep into my lungs. Then I took that picture.

The next morning, I went out to peek at them before I headed to work, and they were… gone. Someone had ripped them right off at the stem and carried them away.

(Deer don’t eat peonies, just FYI. Especially when the neighborhood is the kind of forest ruminant buffet mine is. This was definitely people.)

Life has been tough lately, for me and many people I’m in daily contact with. I’ve been working hard to let it all flow through me instead of accumulating and stagnating so I can show up well for myself and for others. The recent explosion of my flowers, which I’ve been steadily, if inexpertly, cultivating for years now, was helping, offering medicinal-grade joy straight into my veins.

So as I stood there, staring, dumbfounded, at the torn-off stems, my first thought was, SERIOUSLY?!? STEALING MY JOY?!? I wasn’t even mad at that point. Just grief-stricken because it felt so emblematic of the state of the world right now. Selfishness, greed, and a complete inability to care about other people, I lamented. This isn’t the world I want to live in.

Was I having an existential crisis over some stolen flowers, standing in my front yard on a weekday morning? Yes. Yes, I was.

Then I thought, Dammit. I’m gonna have to put up a fence.

Admittedly, this isn’t the first time my house and yard have been vandalized. When Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, and Black Lives Matter arose as an organizational force in politics, I put a BLM sign on my front railing. Within days, it got tagged, covered in red spray paint that dripped down onto the porch.

A few years later, I planted a beautiful peach climbing rose in the mulched bed out front in honor of my Grandma Mary, next to the hydrangea I’d planted over my dad’s ashes. A true Southern Belle, Mary never went anywhere without her lipstick on and nails done. And she always smelled of rose body powder, which lived in a round, pink, plastic container on her vanity with a pouf inside. So, I knew she would have loved those soft-colored roses, their color popping against the ludicrous purple and lavender of my house and their scent wafting out everywhere.

Like with the peonies, when the grandma rose started blooming for the first time, I would go out each morning to check on her. One morning, I went out to discover that someone had dug her up in the night. There was just a hole and a few petals left behind where she had been, not unlike when a weasel once got into our hen house on the farm. No trace of the bodies that had so recently lived there, just feathers dancing slightly in the breeze across the chicken shit.

Despite my ambivalence, generally, about the notion of private property, I’m also instinctually territorial as hell. I suspect most people are. Including my people, incensed on my behalf when they heard about this latest violation, who were feeding that urge. You need a fence, they insisted.

I do. I probably need a fence, I responded. But I don’t want a fucking fence.

This resistance seemed a little ridiculous, even to me. So, I sat with it for a few days to try and make sense of it, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

There’s nothing wrong with a fence, in and of itself. What’s wrong, for me, is creating a boundary between me and my neighbors fed by territoriality and defensiveness, based on the assumption that I have to protect myself from them because if I don’t, they will inevitably trespass against me. This is the kind of belief that leads old people out to their yards, yelling at random kids to Get off my lawn! lest chaos ensue.

This is the kind of reactionary territoriality that insists in response to the statistically small number of immigrants who have committed crimes, Build a wall! Protect our southern border!

It’s disproportionate fear masquerading as a fence. It’s letting your most primal emotions landscape the world.

I’ve lived in this house for almost eleven years. Over that span, random, selfish, shitty people have done random, selfish, shitty things to it three times. Do I wish that number were zero instead of three? Absolutely. I also wish my heart had never been broken. But if I take the risk to put myself out into the world repeatedly over the course of my life, statistically, sometimes my heart’s gonna get broken. What am I going to do? Stop loving people?

I’ll tell you what else. After my grandma rose got stolen, I defiantly tried to root the single cane the thieves left behind. I’m not a great gardener, so it was a total bust. When I went to buy a replacement, finally, pandemic supply issues meant I couldn’t find one. Instead, what I found was a rose with a name my deeply Christian grandma would have loved, Joseph’s Coat. The next year, I found another one of the same variety. Now, they grow towards each other across my front railing, and this year? They are riotous.

Another thing. When I texted my mom about the peonies, she responded philosophically that maybe they’d share what they’d taken. I could always grow more.¹

I felt dismissed and diminished, feelings I would have just stewed in, and bitched to my friends about like a teenager, protecting my sense of myself as different and better than my maddening mother. Instead, I texted back, Saying I’m sorry that happened would have been better, Mama. And do you know what my 84-year-old mother, who self-defines as “not good at emotions” wrote in response? That she realized she was trying to distance herself from her anger. That she was sorry. And then, like the good Quaker she is, she thanked me for eldering her.²

That conversation, in all its honesty, accountability, love, and integrity, was worth every peony on my block.

What am I trying to say, in the end? A few things, I guess. Put up boundaries when you need to (or a fence if you can afford to), but only to give yourself the necessary space to stay open-hearted. Not out of defensiveness or fear. Trust that even when all seems lost, beauty comes back, sometimes stronger than you ever imagined. And if you can stay open-hearted and in your integrity, you may find that the deepening of connection in the face of loss is surprisingly sweet.

I’m gonna plant more peonies this weekend. Do my part to answer the degradations of community with even more redolent, riotous beauty.

Let my defiance be sweet-smelling and electric magenta. Amen.

1. Pro-tip: Responding to someone else’s violation philosophically is always the wrong choice. These platitudes “When God closes a door he opens a window”, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”, “Well, life is suffering” and “Everything happens the way it’s supposed to” also commonly do this damage. Erase them all from your communication vocabulary, please. Just say you’re sorry it happened. It’s that simple.

2. Quaker eldering is the idea of wise and loving correction. Typically, it’s offered from an older to a younger person, thus, “eldering.” But truly wise elders recognize all they don’t know and gratefully receive eldering from anyone. You can, too.