Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America

by Nancy Rosenblum,
Psychology Today, July 12, 2016

In Robert Frost’s classic poem, “Mending Wall,” a man tells an apple farmer that the two of them must maintain the stone boundary between their orchards. With a boulder firmly grasped in his hands, he declares that “Good fences makes good neighbors.” Sensing that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the apple farmer is not so sure. “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,” he tells us, “And to whom I was like to give offense.”