Good fences make good neighbor(hood)s . . . really?

My wife and I have occupied the same house for more than three decades. Whether it was Robert Frost or Wolfgang Mider who uttered the famous phrase, good fences make good neighbors, we have mostly minded our own business during the last thirty-five years. It isn’t that we have a problem with the people who occupy the four other houses on out street–quite the contrary, actually. One neighbor has been my personal physician seemingly forever (a darned good one, too). Another couple looks after our cat when necessary. A third was my student at Plymouth State; the fact that she’s now well into her forties and has college-age children of her own makes my stomach queazy. After all of this time, I hold the honor of being the oldest person on the street . . . how the heck did that happen? 

Back to the point of this post. We always felt fortunate when friends and family reported their experiences with obnoxious neighbors, or the occasional petty crime. “Not us . . . never here,” we would say privately. But, if there is one thing we all know about time, it is the universal changer of conditions. In our case, a lovely couple, whose tenure in the neighborhood predates our own, passed away during the last couple of years. It wasn’t long before one of their surviving children sold the house. Unfortunately, the purchaser was a resident of Massachusetts. These owners had no intention of occupying the house themselves. Instead, they soon rented it to groups of three (probably more) university students. Students being students, they are ignorant of neighborhood traditions and town parking regulations. Slowly, the house has taken on an Animal House aura, and the quietude of the area has been upset. One home owner repeatedly appealed to everyone who should be listening. Unfortunately, nobody was.

Is there a way to help this unfortunate woman, while returning this neighborhood to its prior becalmed state? One thing is for certain, those fences are not the answer. The good people of this neighborhood–old and young, single and married, with and without children who live at home–have united with one cause in mind. We are working together to educate our town’s governors that a problem persists and the necessary remedies are in place, awaiting proper activation. The time to deal with this comparatively minor issue is now–before it increases in scale or severity. So, Misters Frost and Mider, those fences may be a panacea when conditions range between blissful and mundane. However, when circumstances threaten, there is a lot to be said for open gates.