Monday musings!

Tomorrow, Tuesdays morning, I will be officiating at a funeral for a dear member of our church who lived at Thornapple Manor. She died with pnuemonia this past Saturday afternoon. One of her favorite poems was Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall.'

Something there is that doesn't love a wall
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders 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 sue 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 out-door 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 that 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 was I walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall
That wants it down. I could say 'Elves' to him,
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.'

Mildren was a kind woman who had a strong faith, and dearly loved her friends. She was extremely loyal, and her life motto seemed to be: 'Always be making new friends, and keeping the old ones too.' Therefore I don't understand why she would have like this poem so much; so I have written some questions about the poem that I have .................. perhaps you have some answers for me, or questions and/or comments of your own. I welcome them.

*Is the wall a good idea in the sense it brings two neighbors together to work on repairing it?
*Why does the author of the poem every year help his neighbor repair the wall if he doesn't like it?
*Isn't it interesting they 'keep the wall between' them as they work together, as though they are afraid to enter each others property?
*In the area of their orchards, where there the most fruitfulness, the author says there's no need for the wall, but the neighbor disagrees?
*What is it that the neighbor finds so threatening that he/she won't look beyond their fathers saying to find the reason for the quote?