The Wall My Neighbor Wanted Gone

What Was Left Standing

Norm called me the week the story finally settled, having heard the whole thing secondhand from Melissa, who still called him every Sunday out of habit. He laughed for a solid minute before he could get a full sentence out, and then he told me his wife always did say that wall would outlive every single one of us on that hill, one way or another.

Rita and I have not become friends, and I doubt we ever will, but she did call my company that fall, quietly, and asked whether I would take on the job of properly rebuilding the corner of her slope her contractor had damaged, tied correctly into my original wall this time, done right and permitted from the start. I thought about saying no. I took the job instead, because a hillside does not care who was right, it only cares whether the work gets done properly, and because my husband always said the whole point of building something solid was that it was still standing long after everybody had forgotten why the argument started.

We finished that stretch of stone in October, right as the maples on the ridge turned the color they turn every single year, the same color they turned the autumn my husband and I first stood back and looked at what we had built together. My wall is still there behind it all, sixty feet of stacked limestone that nobody at Catbird Ridge will ever again call an eyesore in a formal letter taped to my door. It held the hill for twenty years before anybody thought to test it, and it is still holding it now, quietly, the way it always did the job in the first place, without asking anybody’s permission or anybody’s thanks.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.