After several years we crossed the Atlantic again to go to the USA. One of the first things we did was visit family we had not met in quite some time. After the pleasantries were exchanged, I commented on the distance and time it took for us to drive down to their place. The response was rather interesting and forms the basis of this article. “It’s good to have this distance, this way we keep in touch and also do not encroach upon each other’s lives”.
I smiled, the conversation immediately brought back a poem I had studied in school. ‘Mending Wall’ by Frost is relevant even today as the thin line that separates endearment and civility still remains an interesting point of discussion. The poem entails two country neighbours who meet along the wall that separates their properties to mend it where needed; hence the title mending wall.
The irony of their coming together to build the wall is not lost on the readers. The speaker in the poem is rather progressive and questions the very need for such a wall, the neighbour, however, is a traditionalist and insists that good fences make good neighbours.
Love knows no barriers, no distance, no fences. It does not understand the need to be civil and does not reveal itself from neat, planned distances. Love can get messy, it mocks imposed conditions and does not stay within the tidy picket fences. It encroaches but also grants you intimacy and bliss that restrain cannot even begin to fathom. Two people get lost in a desert and just when they are about to give up, they come across a high wall. They can hear faint sounds of life from the other side, water, birds and people!
At a distance, they can also see green branches, laden with what seems like delicious fruit. One of them somehow manages to climb over the wall and disappears. The other, however, break the wall to help other lost travellers find their way to the oasis. Walls; metaphoric, self-imposed and or otherwise can separate suburb from suburb, city from city, country from country, people from people and eventually family from family. Break them to find the oasis within, to let love in.