Those people who hang over the fence and why I want to be like them
Jul 11, 2023
My husband did a fine pruning job on the hydrangea in the corner of our yard last fall, hence the spray of off-white florets this summer. Driving home yesterday, I wondered what was proper pruning etiquette when it comes to prolific, wild flowering like what we have going on here—and a fence. Should one keep it inside and tidy, or let the bows hang freely wherever they want to?
The thought came to mind that if the fence separated my yard and my neighbor's, I would have had to think about it some more, but since it only borders our own driveway, it's probably not considered untidy, is it?
Many of us share a fence with a neighbor who has a tree that bears something or other that it drops on our side of the property line. Or their dead trees fall into our yard, becoming entirely our problem (a nasty surprise we got on January 1st last year. The surprise was not so much the tree as the law in this regard!)
As for live trees near a fence, initially one my think oneself lucky to get pecans for free, for example, until the green sheaths around those stain your driveway and the squirrels leave the hard shells all over one's yard (or so a friend tells me). Or mulberry trees. One soon discovers that children + bare feet + mulberries = carpet stains.
Occasionally, one truly is lucky. Perhaps the neighbor has a breathtakingly beautiful maple that announces the change of season to remind you that whatever is sitting sideways in your heart today shall pass too. And to crown it all the maple is planted in such a spot that you have an unobscured view of its lovely form all year round—perhaps an even better view than the neighbor himself— without a single leaf ever making it onto your leaf pile in the fall. All the color, none of the labor. What a deal!
But then there is the neighbor (perhaps we are that neighbor) who will prune the peach tree in such a way that none of the lovely fruit will accidentally find their way into the legal territory of your yard, since you do not deserve to benefit from the owner's effort to grow the delectable fruit. It's only right, isn't it? Especially if you—the undeserving neighbor—perpetrated the crime of infrequent mowing, or otherwise seem lazy when it comes to gardening chores. The peach farmer feels you can grow yourself whatever you'd like to enjoy, same as he does.
Maples and yards, fruit and flowers aside, we each are like a tree. We bear something. We drop stuff. Some good and tasty, some messy and gnarly. We impact people, one way or the other. We also have our own space that borders on the space of others. Sometimes literal spaces like our seat in a movie theater, our parking space, or our cubicle at work. It matters how we attempt to bear our stuff within those boundaries and what we do with what gets dropped on the other side of the boundary into someone else's space.
But this is not a sermon about boundaries and cleaning up what hangs over your proverbial fence. It is a shout-out to the people who are like our white hydrangea. The people who have more than they need. Who enjoy fully what is on their side of the fence but who freely hang what is extra over that fence for others to enjoy, to pick, to smell, to cut and put in a vase, if they like. It's a thank you to those people who do not trim and save and police and border up every bit of benefit that could accidentally land freely and without merit in the lap of the "lazier"-than-thou.
I want to be like you. I want to keep my mess off the driveways of others and out from under their bare feet, but when I have a bursting bouquet of whatever, whenever, I hope I'll remember to be like you and go to that line nobody really wants to cross, to the corner where I border onto those who are "other," to the fence between me and the person I never look in the eye, and hang untidily over the fence with open hands.
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