“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Robert Frost’s poem has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about mending fences.

This spring, I’ve tasked myself with tearing down a section of fence on our property that, thanks to the elements and disuse, has fallen into disrepair.

I remember, semi-fondly, when the fence was put up. It was a long summer project, completed by my parents, with me mostly tasked with gopher jobs and minding my toddler brother. Semi-fondly remembered because any family task that goes on this long and involves digging through layer of rock after layer of rock, will eventually have some unfortunate moments. But, like most things, there were moments of humor and the pride that comes with finishing a big job.

Over the years, however, the things that don’t love a wall, or a fence, came in the form of fallen trees, rust, and destructive animals.

Since this pasture is out of sight, out of mind, it wasn’t such a big deal. However, a few years ago, Steve had been horrified when he found a small fawn tangled in the fence, near death, while he was doing a walk about.

Sadly, the creature couldn’t be saved. Not long after that, a microburst in the Fall of 2021 brought a good number of trees down onto a large section of the fence, and Steve decreed that we’d be cleaning up the mess and tearing down that section of the fence come summer.

Unfortunately, the summer of 2022 didn’t see much accomplished other than grieving on my part.

I recently developed a new training regimen for the dogs, and as such, I need to utilize this field a lot more heavily than I did before, and it became apparent that the broken fence was not only in the way, but potentially dangerous to the dogs, particularly Duncan, whose keen terrier nose sniffed out every small animal who took shelter in the fallen trees on the fence, but whose terrier toes also seemed to find every sharp wire to step on.

The first step was to clear the fallen trees from the area, where I could. While I’ve become a lot better at utilizing a chain saw, and I only ever buck trees that have fallen naturally, it’s still not my favorite activity. This was necessary work and at the end of several days, I had the wood cleared, and a nice stack of firewood, so two birds with one stone.

Once the wood was mostly out of the way (in some cases, the fence had grown into the tree and those sections will have to be moved off to an area where they can deteriorate on their own because I don’t have the patience to mess with them) I moved on to pulling the fence posts out of the ground.

There were spots where the posts had snapped off at the base and I could easily snip the fence and roll up a section of fence and posts. There were other areas where the fence had become unsecured and could be removed separately.

It didn’t take long to figure out that there was a reason the fence got pulled away, but not the posts. Those posts were the ones that hadn’t rusted out and were sunk deeply into the ground. I was originally hoping some could be salvaged if I decided to put new fence up, but as luck would have it, they were few and far between.

Too few to try to salvage, but also a lot when each one had to be worked back and forth and loosened and finally pulled out of the ground.

As I worked my way around, I found evidence of multiple fence fixes from decades of “just trying to keep it together.” There were a few parts where broken fence was tied together with pieces of binder twine. Another section had a different style of fencing pieced into a hole. Then there was a whole section where we gave up on trying to install posts and just ran the fence along the backs of trees. There was a loose piece of fence that I used to use to create a temporary corral, when I had to capture our whole flock of sheep for shearing time or when I had to administer medications that had lain on the ground for years, becoming embedded in the weeds and dirt. I felt like an archaeologist until I had that dug out.

I had a lot of good memories in that field, both building that fence, repairing it, and taking care of all the animals that lived inside of it. I also had some bad ones, like the nasty little goat that ran me right into one of the fence posts, resulting in a scar that I still have on my shoulder, and a quick trip to the ER for a tetanus shot.

There was also the notorious Edelweiss, a slim, timid looking goat. Slim and timid until you had a fence you wanted to keep her in. Then, she turned into the Michael Jordan of goats and could jump straight up in the air and over any obstacle in her way. She was a first-class escape artist, much to the dismay of vegetable gardens and decorative flowers everywhere.

I also thought back to one of the very first occupants of the pasture, my first pony, Susabella. One of the few pictures that I have of her (back when pictures came 24 to a roll and you had to mail the film in for processing, we didn’t take selfies every day) is me standing next to her, with a new section of fence, and my dad’s pickup in the background. From what I can make out on the truck, it looks like we might have just finished putting the fence up.

Frost’s poem ends with the quote, “good fences make good neighbors.” I don’t have any immediate neighbors, and soon, I won’t have this fence anymore either, but along the way I discovered that bad fences make good memories.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears weekly in the Times News