I Put Up a Fence in Maine. Why Did It Cause Such a Fuss?

When we bought our house in Maine 23 years ago, people welcomed us to town with tales of local mishaps and gaffes. Barns that almost burned down. Pipes that burst. The man a mile down the road who built a fence. This chatty imparting of intel functioned simultaneously as a gesture of hospitality and a comical how-not-to primer, containing valuable survival and etiquette tips. Our town of about 830 residents more than doubles in size during the summer, when part-time residents like me arrive. The fence story suggested what types of behavior on your personal property were, and were not, considered neighborly in a town where zoning ordinances are few.

Listen to this article, read by Kirsten Potter

“You won’t ever get rid of the magazine room, will you?” people asked. The magazine room is on our house’s second floor. It’s basically a vintage mood board, and more of a windowless crawl space than a room, accessible through what looks like a cupboard door. A much earlier resident, or successive generations of earlier residents, had patchworked the pitched, unpainted walls of the magazine room with clippings from what appeared to be fashion, adventure-story and homemaking periodicals dating to the first half of the 1900s.

We promised never to renovate the magazine room.

We promised to change very little about our house, at least what was visible from the road, including the 11-foot-tall deciduous hedge that ran the length of our yard and seasonally blurred our view of the traffic coming in and out of town.

After a passing driver plowed through the hedge in front of their house, Julavits and her husband decided to replace it with a fence. Credit…Fumi Nagasaka for The New York Times

But then the hedge began to fail. An expert from a nearby nursery arrived with a clipboard and pronounced our hedge an invasive, nonnative weed, not worth saving. But we loved the weed. We topped it. We fertilized it.