Fences

FENCES

Michael Halfhill

All Rights Reserved © 2013 by Michael Halfhill

I don’t like fences. When I was a boy fences didn’t exist in my world. Birds, squirrels, bunnies, cats, and especially dogs went where they pleased. My dog’s name was Poochie. When school began each year I’d leave Poochie behind not thinking he might go away. Of course he always did. Looking back, I seemed to have had a different dog every spring, and each was of the free spirit variety, and I tagged them all with the same name—Poochie. When Poochie wasn’t wading in the treacherous Kanawha River, he was close by me seeking nothing more than a pat on the head, or an ear scratched. Like all the dogs in that town, Poochie was the offspring of some itinerant curbstone Casanova—no fancy bloodlines for me! From morning to dusk my Poochie and I would explore the narrow band of valley floor that separated the muddy Kanawha River from the green -forested mountains that towered over the little town where I grew up.

Every Sunday, Poochie would sit outside the church door yelping, and whining his belief in the absurdity of religion. An hour lost in prayer was a terrible waste when compared to frolicking in a place that had no fences. For a young boy, it was a broad world, a place where there were no fences.

I’m all grown up now. I live far away from the muddy Kanawha River and those green mountains, in a place that was once full of meadows and woods sliced open with thin lanes of shiny macadam.  When a deer died it was because it was hunting season.

Nowadays, big new houses that few can afford to furnish fill the meadows. Roads are crowded with telephone toting drivers, and the deer find their natural death beneath the wheels of oversized vehicles. Fences divide the ground with a surveyor’s precision and the world is hemmed in and narrow.

My dogs are elegant, purebred canines now. I’ve given them quirky names that make people smile. I have a fence to keep them penned up so they won’t run away when the weather gets cold and school children huddle together in the early morning mists.

I miss Poochie. I miss the time when there were no fences, and the world was broad.