this fence

‘He who angers you, conquers you’.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny

‘What are you girls doing?’, asked Dan, as he craned over the rickety fence, due to be replaced next week, that divides our gardens. ‘Planting bushes?’

Anna, her nose pierced and black cap pulled down, looked up in surprise just as Tim, 6 foot 3, came into view, pushing a full wheelbarrow down the grass towards us.

            ‘Mind you don’t plant those bushes too close to this fence’, said Dan, changing his tone.

            ‘Yes, of course’, I replied. ‘They’ll be a metre and a half away. And they don’t have big roots’.

            ‘You do realise’, said Dan, ‘that the new fence will take a different line from this one.’

            ‘No’, I replied.

            ‘Don’t you read anything?’ said Dan. ‘I gave you the new survey I had done a year ago. Put it in your letterbox.’

            ‘Was that the paperwork that came with a copy of the Fence Act? Ok, yes, I did receive that. But I didn’t see a survey’.

            ‘Well’, said Dan, ‘there’s a bow in this fence line. And next week, when the fence people run a string-line from that brick pillar at the top, to that metal post at the bottom, we’ll be taking back the land that’s ours on to our side’.

            ‘Oh’, I said. ‘I thought the new fence was starting half way down, leaving the newer half of the fence in place. That’s what I agreed with the fence people’.

            ‘No’, said Dan. ‘We are paying for the top part and it will be our fence’.

            ‘But this is our fence’, I said, dropping my rake. ‘It’s a division. That’s what a fence is. And I’ve agreed to pay half’.

            As the conversation went from bad to worse, Anna and Tim busied themselves digging holes for the new trees. Little did they know that I was only out there gardening because I was flanked by them, and that I’d otherwise be too uncomfortable to garden alone within the direct sight of my neighbours.

            ‘I’m sorry Dan’, I said. ‘I just can’t have this conversation over the fence. I had five trees along the fence chopped down on Friday – just like you asked – and then spent most of Saturday cleaning up the mess. And now you’re saying things about taking down all the fence and a survey that’s news to me’. I picked up my rake, put my head down and went back to clearing away matted ground cover to make space for the new trees.

A minute later, Dan’s partner appeared and put her hand on the fence. From the start, Julie’s face was flushed, her words flying over the fence like angry darts. Perhaps because my mother would fly into tempers when I was a girl, I don’t do angry very well. Occasionally my ex-husband shouted at me; however because I didn’t shout back, things never went beyond a few repeated swear words and the stamping of his foot. Instead of getting angry back, I would freeze in place and wait for the noise to stop; or one of us would leave the room and end it that way.

Only Julie at the fence didn’t stop. The noise went on. As I stood there being shouted at, I felt like a character in a film. Forcing myself to speak, and hoping to calm Julie down, I said that removing the plum trees was a sign of my wanting to cooperate. I said that I really wanted to have friendly relations with neighbours. And then I said something about our all being human, which made Julie grimace; and also that I didn’t understand the way she and Dan were treating me. Although, I’m pretty sure that the boiling feeling in my head prevented my actual words coming out as cleanly as they’re written here.

But Julie would have none of my airy-fairy, beside the point-ness. She said that if I spent more time gardening, and being responsible for my property, that none of this (what’s “this?”, I wondered) might have happened. Then she leaned over the fence and pointed at the plum-tree stumps. She said that with the new survey line, the stumps would lie partly in their garden and so would need stump-grinding. And the ivy would need poisoning. She said that the two tall trees at the bottom of my garden would have to go too, glaring at me as if only an imbecile could love them. The 12-metre high elderberry in the corner, she explained in a disdainful tone, was a noxious weed, and that if one of her dogs ate its bark, they would die. And the one this side of it, which even I could see needed trimming, Julie said was just ugly. She said a lot of other things too. I remember how red her face went, and the way she thumped the fence to make her points. But because she grew increasingly angry, her exact words now escape me.  

Dan and Julie have a beautiful cottage garden which would be at home in a village in Dorset, Sussex or Normandy. On several occasions over the last months, I’ve made a point of telling Dan how beautiful his garden is. It’s clear to me how hard he works in it and I admire him for it.

Over the five years that Dan and Julie have been pulling their garden into shape, much has happened on my side of the fence – although little of it in the garden. Our garden has stayed as it’s always been – loose, a bit wild and, with recent rains, very green. A magical place to get lost in and dream. Every day I am thankful for it – and not a little amazed that it’s mine. Still, while I’ve felt compelled to admire my neighbours’ prowess in their garden – my mother was a strong gardener too – I haven’t felt drawn to the same in mine.

When, last night at dinner, I poured out my fence trouble to my son, he said that he was sorry and that I should have said and that I shouldn’t have to deal with it on my own and that he’d get time off from work to be there when the string-line was done – assuming, that is, that the fence people actually come to replace the fence they were booked to start putting up ten days ago.

‘What is it, anyway, about you and older male neighbours?’ my son then asked. I laughed but saw his point. Five years ago, another male neighbour, of a similar age on the opposite side of our garden, took to leaning a long way over our fence when I was out, to lop tree branches which he dropped into our garden. Just as Dan had started doing from his side of the fence, again with no consultation, over the last few months.

‘I really don’t know,’ I said, nursing the ankle that I’d sprained seconds after the blow-up with Julie that morning, when I’d tripped over my rake and fallen into the fence. ‘Perhaps they retire too early.’ There was a pause. ‘It’s just as well that James (my ex-husband) isn’t here,’ I said. ‘He so hated this sort of thing’.

After a stream of panicked texts to the yoga studio where I was booked to teach early the next morning, I went upstairs to plan a modified class. Sitting on the carpet on the bathroom floor, the wind blowing a gale outside, I came back to myself. As I stared at my lesson plan with my sore ankle stretched out, the light low and my phone set for 6am, it struck me that the following morning was the birthday of my elder sister who, 9 years ago, died at home the morning after getting off a transatlantic flight the previous day.

More than any other, this early death of my sister – and that of a close friend in the UK a couple of years before – have shaped my life since then. The wound has closed over but it a tenderness remains. My life has been thrown into relief by these deaths. They have taught me something so important that I don’t have words for it. Except to say that these women, my sister and my friend, are my guardian angels. Thanks to them I will always be brave enough to take flak from my neighbours, to teach yoga with a sprained ankle and to throw a drinks party on my own – and so many other things. Life goes on without my sister and friend in it. But to a different tune, another way of knowing.

Next morning, when I woke before the alarm around the same time that my sister died 9 years ago, my ankle, which I had to hop into bed on the night before, felt magically better. I didn’t demonstrate every pose in the class I rushed off to teach, but I didn’t have to hop either.

marshmallow test

Choosing not to have whatever it is that we want now, for the sake of a greater good in the future, is an easy enough principle to understand. Share your toys, wait for sweet treats and take your turn – these are the basics of what we aim to pass on as parents to our kids. Until I listened to Walter Mischel read his book, ‘The Marshmallow Test’ on audio, I thought this about summed it up.

Intrigued by listening to the audio, I borrowed ‘The Marshmallow Test’ from the library, and soon realised that the psychology in the book was about a lot more than marshmallows. (And in case, like me, you’re wondering about marshmallows being offered as a treat to 21^st-century children, M&M’s are now the sweets of choice.) Yes, this book is about self-control and our struggle to master it. But it’s about other things too.

What rang true for me came in a discussion of – wait for it – pension funds. The idea is that to the degree your perception of your current self is divorced from that of your future self (which Mischel describes as ten years older than however old you are now) you’re likely to struggle to withstand temptations in the present (a holiday, say) for the sake of a shadowy future good (a bigger pension in old age). As Mischel explains, MRI scans can now show that some people treat their future self as a stranger, as distinct from their current self. Why then, they think, put money aside for a relative stranger? Luckily for pension funds, others feel more intimacy with and compassion for their future self. For these people, ten or twenty years hence doesn’t seem that far off. And because they can imagine themselves as older versions of themselves, they’re naturally inclined to provide for that not so shadowy future.

Something similar goes on with the people that I teach yoga to. Most people come to yoga because they feel called to it. It might be a niggle in one shoulder. Perhaps it’s loose knee joints. It might be a sports injury or decades spent hunched in front of a screen. Some people react with annoyance at whatever brings them to the yoga studio. Their body has let them down; in a better world, their shoulder would know better and pull itself together on command. Others are more philosophical. For them, a dicky knee is part and parcel of getting older for which the best response is calm resignation, an acceptance of fate. Others assume that they’ll attend yoga class to rehab their shoulder/knee/lower back, in the same way they might have a few sessions with the physio, before returning to multi-day hikes and playing tennis under lights. Thankfully, there are also people who come to yoga and get it, if they haven’t already, straight away. They know that they’ll be strengthening their core, aligning their posture and reversing hours they spend sitting down for the rest of their life.

I used to think that the people who saw their yoga journey (or preferred strength training) as ongoing – as a single not a return ticket – were more switched on both medically and philosophically. Perhaps they are. However, reading ‘The Marshmallow Test’ made me realise that, compared with someone who treats their dodgy shoulder as a temporary annoyance, someone who embraces yoga (or other strength training) is often more in touch with their future self. Their future self is no stranger; but simply a more wrinkled version of the person they already are. Providing for themselves, by keeping their core strong and inflammation at bay, is their way of looking after the person they are on the way to becoming.

Recently, I had my own brush with the marshmallow test. At my last dental check-up, as usual, the dentist said very little when he inspected my teeth. But my hygienist who, after 12 years of cleaning and polishing my teeth I consider a friend, was less discreet. She told me that the enamel on some of my top teeth was eroding and that I needed to be careful if I wanted to keep them into old age. Lying in the dental chair, panicking, I tried not to show it. Lose some of my top teeth! How horrid and shameful that would be, I thought to myself.

It took a whole week before my panic subsided enough to ask myself a practical question. What was I doing in my daily life that might be wearing down the enamel on my teeth? It didn’t take long to twig that one of the things I was doing, and had done for years, was to drink a lot of green tea which, I discovered with annoyance, has a particularly high acid content. So, that could be one culprit. Another might be dark chocolate, often gulped just before teaching a yoga class. There was also my personal history of too much brushing and the luck of my genes. My first response to this bad news was flat denial. Give up green tea in the morning and dark chocolate at night? You have to be kidding. No way.

To cut a long story short, another week passed before I realised that it was up to me how I responded to the news that my tooth enamel was wearing down. I could frame my decision to give up green tea and dark chocolate as a sacrifice, as one more thing to be deprived of as the years piled up behind me. Then again, I could do something much simpler. I could draw a line and just step over it. I could choose not to make a fuss and to substitute green tea for a tea that isn’t acid forming, to switch out dark chocolate for carob, and to thank the stars above that with any luck I’ve acted in time.

Thankfully, apart from the missing caffeine hit, Rooibos tea ticks the boxes for me. I can drink it happily in the morning – as I write this in my notebook – knowing that by swapping out my teas I can stay on good terms with my future self; and that, whatever happens to my health in years to come, I’m walking towards my future self with eyes open.

Lucky, I suppose, that I’ve never liked marshmallows.