January 31, 1963: The Frances Hubbard Diaries

January 31, 1963

Thurs  partly Cloudy in AM becoming fair in PM 5-20. I wrote to Marilyn and ironed.  Gerald and Roger went to clean up apartment and get settled.  Girls and I went to prayer meeting at parsonage.  Myrtie called and asked if Doug had gone.  Clifton had a bad cold.

Comment:  Myrtie and Otis Hall lived up the road about a quarter of a mile and really were good people if perhaps a little parochial.  They were brother and sister and neither ever married. Because they were our closest neighbors and without any children in their lives,  they probably watched and listened in wonder as we kids grew up as the ultimate  "free range" kids with access to tractors, motor vehicles and firearms. Otis got the mumps as a young man.  He became sterile and could not sire children.  Here is my previous blog about them:

Otis & Myrtie

Ote and Myrtie were our neighbors up the road a quarter mile.
Spinster maid and bachelor brother and you seldom saw them smile.

Pinched lips, all prim and proper, all clothes buttoned to the top.
But always free and easy with the rumors they would drop.

Myrtie was a teacher long retired but taught in church.
While Otis ran some “young stock” and I guess he never "worked".

Got the mumps when just a child and my Dad said they “moved down”
He said that was the reason that no children were around.

'Cause I always thought them married when I saw them on the road
In that pretty two-door Chevy with their monthly grocery load.

We usually did not see or hear them very much at all
‘Less our cows got in their garden then we’d get an angry call.

Us kids and Dad would get the cows and try to fix the fence,
But for gardens ruined and trampled, there is no recompense.

“Good fences make good neighbors” are the words of Robert Frost
And we should have kept them better no matter what the cost.

Then I get a slightest comfort when I think about it all
He also wrote “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it

And spills the upper boulder in the sun,

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there,

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there,

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors.”

Robert Frost