OGT DAILY Day Three Hundred and Thirty Two STONE WALL

In the back behind my house there is a stone wall of such age and character that you believe it has been there for eternity.   I know this can't be true as it is clearly built by human hands, but its surface is slick with water and moss and cascading ferns and other weeds which catch their footing in the cracks and crevices of its stone bricks.   It has the quality of a rock wall in the Shawagunk Mountains two hours north from here and why not as the stone is probably shale and not too dissimilar?

The wall reminds me that all this stuff in my head, all this about the Russia Investigation, all this about further sex scandals, all this about special elections and tax bills - is nothing really.  The wall, though maybe not eternal, will be here after I'm gone and was here long before I got here.  It's a thing of beauty and it doesn't care a bit about me or anything I think about.  It just is and keeps me grounded and present in this moment, in this house, in this yard, just for now.

Mending Wall 
by Robert Frost

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 neighbour 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 use 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 neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was 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,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

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 neighbours."