On a perfectly still day, in nearly the exact middle of a hot summer, I sit on my back porch, staring into the sizable vacant lot on the other side of our fence. Brittle weeds do not break off and dance in the wind; sand does not blow around; discarded gum wrappers do not stumble across the landscape; perfectly still. Our backyard might as well be an extension of that vacant lot, but for the fence.

The fence is neither one of the sane picket fences that indicate a tasteful, quiet, refined lifestyle, nor a forbidding urban chain-link construction; rather, it is both, and many others as well. The fence is not a unified structure, but a collage of sections of other fences. It starts on the left as crisscrossed wooden planks, and ends on the right as brick wall. In between are sections made from intertwined twigs, concrete, glass, barbed wire, molded plastic, rubber tires, and more. In the center, a shoddy wooden gate is starting to fall off its hinges.

The fence is often silent. Sometimes the rusting aluminum rattles, the posts creak, the gate blows open or slams shut, but these are due to external conditions. At other times, though, when all else is quiet, I sense the fence reminiscing, quietly nostalgic about its former lives. The fence's sections seem to consider themselves in retirement, and are content to face the vacant lot, passing the time until they collapse and new sections need to be put up; but each section has stories of earlier days, days of nervous tension and of action, days when they actually served to keep things in or out. They seem to regard those days with the indulgence that the old have for the young, as if it had been foolish of them to strive to become anything more than territorial markers.

I have sometimes wanted to be such a fence.