Are You Going to Put up a Fence?

In the midst of a conversation about politics and the contrariness and polarization of modern life — you know, all those light, casual topics — a good friend recently asked, “What difference would it make if we disappeared from our neighborhoods?” The conversation paused as we mulled over his question; neither of us immediately answered.

To be honest, at most previous points in my adult life, I don’t think I would have had a particularly good answer to his question. The most accurate response would have been that if my family moved away, we would just be gone. Someone new would occupy our house, the landscaping might change, and that would be it. I have learned, though, that we can make a whole lot of difference, but it requires a willingness to give away some of ourselves, including our sense of privacy and independence. Let me explain.

A few years ago, when we were looking for houses, I hoped most for community. As a family, we were looking to make our radius smaller — my commute at the time pushed an hour — but we loved our next-door neighbors. Recently retired, with grandkids of a similar age to our kids, they held a special place in our hearts. My reasoning was that while I could rank houses based on my preferred number of bedrooms (4) or bathrooms (2+) or maple trees (the more, the better), I couldn’t really know what the neighbors were like from a listing.

It took us two weekends and two offers to find our home, a minor miracle in May of 2022 when it seemed like everyone was buying and no one was selling. As we drove through the neighborhood a week or so after our offer had been accepted, we were impressed by how many kids biked in the streets and how many neighbors seemed to be standing around chatting. There was a huge community park, accessed by paths five houses down whether you turned left or right from the end of our new driveway. Despite the very old carpet and an air conditioner seemingly not serviced since it was installed in 1974 (it would break just weeks after we moved in), we were thrilled.

As we moved our belongings into the house, over a dozen neighbors came to say hello. Someone dropped off cookies, another a cake. Still another offered use of their pool (“Just text when you want to swim!”). As we introduced ourselves, our kids, our dog, nearly all asked, “Are you going to put up a fence?” We deferred our answer in the moment and pondered. Are they asking because of our dog? Are they worried she’ll wander? Should we get a fence? We had a fence at our previous home, but we also felt overextended by the enormity of buying a new house that would need a great deal of work. Plus, our dog was generally allergic to being more than twenty feet away from us, so she was unlikely to go far.

Finally, I scraped up the courage to ask an immediate neighbor when she posed the same question, “Will you put up a fence?”

“I don’t know, people keep asking us, though. Do you know why that is?”

“Oh,” she replied, “everyone walks through your yard. It’s been a community path of sorts, and the previous owners didn’t mind.”

Clarity. In their Minnesotan way, our neighbors weren’t asking “Will you put up a fence?”, they were asking, “Can we continue to walk through your yard?” We didn’t put up a fence.

In the months immediately following our move, a few things happened. First, people walked through our yard all the time. School-aged kids cut through to get to a friend’s house. Adults walked across to visit a neighbor. It was jarring. Often when we had guests someone would report with concern, “Someone is in your yard?!” “Oh, yes,” we’d say. “It’s fine.” Our guests would usually proceed to tell us how uncomfortable that would make them. How they could never do that in their own neighborhood. And I could see their logic. I would have assumed the same not too much earlier.

Second, people felt welcome to stop by. On one particular morning, I was getting ready for the day, and my then three-year-old started yelling, “Mom! Mom! Mom!” I wasn’t in any particular state to go outside, and so through the open window I tried to ask him to wait. (Remember that broken air conditioner? Our windows were always open that summer.) Before I got too much farther, I suddenly heard two young female voices through the window. Quickly finishing the task at hand, I burst through the back door.

“Hi,” said one girl who appeared to be middle school aged.

“We heard him yelling, so we thought we’d come and check,” her friend chimed in. Both had been in a nearby backyard, heard my son, and thought they’d make sure he was okay. They introduced themselves and a few minutes later, returned to whatever they had been doing.

Third, we learned that some of our neighbors had our garage code. Because of work being done on our house, we had initially moved our stuff in and then left for a few more weeks. Stuck in an awkward transition, we would drive almost daily to our new, still unoccupied house to pick up the mail. Once, we stopped and a neighbor we had recently met walked across the street.

“Hello! We noticed you had a package and weren’t sure if you would get it, so we put it in the garage.”

“Oh?!”

“We had your garage code from before.”

“Oh!”

We’ve since laughed about this story with our neighbors; but as a bit of an understatement, initially we weren’t sure what to think about this intrusion? Kindness? Neighborly care.

Now a few years later, we have observed a more communal approach to ownership and property that feels countercultural in the best way. Ours isn’t the only yard used in common. Our neighbors to the west have a pool that is beloved during the summer. Our neighbors to the east have a trampoline, jumped on by every kid within at least a three-house radius. “Use it any time you’d like!” They still remind us of this offer regularly, and our kids love their trampoline. “Don’t walk all the way to the park entrance, just come through our yard!” our neighbors to the south and across the street told us, pointing to their back fence, which included a shortcut to a community park. Once, those same neighbors invited my family to join them in watching fireworks, visible from their backyard, and when I said my extended family was around (some seven other people in addition to my own family of four), they were invited too, last-minute snacks included, to the delight of the kids. Our neighbor to the north has an elaborate garden, shared by our neighbor to the northwest whose lot is too shady. People have shared tools, baked goods, and stories. Other similar informal networks of kindness and generosity abound.

Interpreted through an American lens that views one’s property as a private “castle,” it would be easy to view this aggressive neighborliness as a violation. Throughout most of our previous neighborhood experiences, our “personal spaces” (our house, our yard, our garage) were seemingly inviolable. In our new neighborhood, this is not the case. “Personal spaces” are mostly yours but are also meant to be used as a mutual resource. A small-scale, lived example of sharing things in common.

What our family has also come to appreciate is that this generous and countercultural use of space does cost something. It is not only disruptive to our American notions of privacy, but we also lose a bit of our presumed safety and autonomy when we trust that our neighbors (and maybe some strangers) have our best interests at heart. There is no fence to separate us. Our kids will strike up conversations with neighbors or wander into another yard where it becomes harder to see them. Our dog crosses over the invisible boundary of our yard, as do other dogs. At least a few times, a friendly dog has taken himself down the street to bark hello at our back door.

But what we’ve gained is much greater than that cost. Our kids have made new friends of all ages — a beloved high-school-aged babysitter, a boy a few years older who builds spectacular snow forts, our mail carrier who stops to ask about their first day of school. Our family has shared meals with many of our neighbors, some more formal and planned far in advance and others much more spontaneously. My husband has lent his skills as a veterinarian and received help in return when he couldn’t get a gutter unstuck, or when his ladder blew down and he was on the roof. A neighbor hemmed my new pants and did alterations on another garment. When an elderly neighbor was diagnosed with a terminal motor neuron disease, we were on call to lift him when he fell. We sent baked goods. We stopped by to say hello. Now that he has passed, we regularly eat dinner with his wife.

I don’t want to pretend that this is always easy or that everyone’s neighborhood could function in exactly the same way overnight. We don’t always agree on politics or attend the same kind of churches or any church at all. We have different approaches to lawn care. We do not share the same sense of when bedtime and quiet hours begin, or how much and what kind of screen time is appropriate for our kids. My point is that there are sometimes very real reasons why we need boundaries, and we can differ in important ways. At the same time, I have learned that sometimes our boundaries can and should be more permeable than we might imagine. And that flexibility and generosity are good and beautiful things. In our neighborhood, we are part of something larger than ourselves, and our presence — and the presence of our neighbors — changes our daily lives because we pursued communal patterns of living that make it so.

Returning to my friend’s question about the difference we make (or don’t make), I think the answer should look something like the community we found surrounding our new home. Please hear me, I am not taking credit for this, quite the contrary. My understanding from our retired neighbor to the south is that this legacy predates her family as well. But they showed up, learned new ways of practicing neighborliness and sought to do the same. Our block has taught us so much more about being a neighbor than I have contributed. Still, in learning this lesson, we now imperfectly but actively seek to extend the same grace and care to others, folding it into our family rhythms. We function best when we live closely, both literally and figuratively. When we concern ourselves with our local community and seek opportunities to share our spaces. When we entangle ourselves for God’s glory and our neighbor’s good.

Elisabeth Lefebvre is an Associate Professor of Education at Bethel University in Minnesota, where she teaches courses focused on educational history, policy, and justice. Her research and writing have appeared in a number of journals and books including Comparative Education Review, the Journal of Education Policy, and Teaching and Teacher Education. Elisabeth also enjoys adventuring with her husband and two kids.