Lately, I am reminded of the poem, Mending Wall by Robert Frost. In an effort to avoid more arduous and meteorologically exposed outdoor duties of raking and rototilling, I have assigned myself the job of remodeling our basement. It’s a somewhat stately turn-of-the-century home with wide trim of yellow pine, a cramped kitchen and a stairwell to the second story that probably accommodated the standard shorter statures of its original less well-fed residents. But after a few jarring encounters with the low ceiling, I have learned to duck.
I was told the brick and stone basement walls had gone unrepaired for more than twenty-five years. The lime in the mortar eroded over time and loosened the soft native bricks, leaving them tentative and untrustworthy. So, I lined the walls with a special mesh and coated them with three layers of concrete.
When I’d finished I stood back and scowled. It looked fine. But mending a wall isn’t as rewarding as, say, building an Adirondack chair or painting your front door red. Frost’s poem begins, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” A wall is a barrier, a border, a warning against trespass and transgression. A wall lacks neighborliness.
The adjoining basement room features a door to the cellar with ancient spider webs and splintery steps that look like they were whittled out of native oak with a pocket knife. Nearby, there is a ragged hole in the top of the brick wall to a small enclosure, left as access, no doubt by some plumber scrambling to replace frozen and broken pipes placed too close to the uninsulated outside wall back when the house was retrofitted for indoor plumbing. The sides of the little dungeon are now lined with R-11 fiberglass to keep the water pipes free of frost. The floor, too, has strips of insulation, sprinkled with here and there with mouse droppings. Mice, it seems, are more neighborly than we are. They cozy up to our artificial warmth. Maybe they enjoy the sound of our voices and the sandwich crumbs in our trash. Maybe they yearn to be our friends.
We have to leave the access open anyway to keep the pipes from freezing. It costs us nothing extra to keep our mice from freezing too and yet, I find myself resentful, having to share our air with rodents. I’m inclined to brick up the hole, entomb them in the little crypt and let mice and pipes all freeze together. The man in Frost’s poem gruffly states, “Good fences make good neighbors.” But, inquires the other character in the poem, “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know, what I was walling in or walling out.”
I have decided, instead, to build a handsome frame around the hole, made with clear pine painted pure white and a decorative silver mesh for a screen, allowing air to pass freely in both directions. Good windows make good neighbors.