"Good fences make good neighbors"

Or maybe weird neighbors.

I was off school for Easter break - my strange task for the day: work out where our property line is.

We are considering getting a new fence and oddly the property line is not the same as the fence line. You see we have been in our house for a little more than 20 years and for first ten years or so we complained bitterly about our neighbor who was not maintaining his trees, nasty "junk trees," locusts with thorny branches that overhung our back yard. Well, it turns out that those three troublesome trees were our trees after all - it's just they were on the outside of the fence in a vacant lot. Logically enough the fence had been placed away from its optimal position because otherwise it would have to go directly through the several trees.

Now, some years later, those never-especially-healthy-looking locusts have been removed and the backyard fence is looking really ragged. A sorry excuse for a wooden fence; the horizontal supports are all warped and individual pickets seems to pop off every other week. There's only so much repair work you can do.

Previously we had a property survey done (because we wanted to be sure we not cutting down someone else's trees) and now, 18 months on, we needed to find those surveyors' markers - metal staves at each corner of the property - to be able to communicate to prospective fencing companies just where the new fence ought to go. It's only a matter of extending our little patch by 18 inches or so but that land is ours! 

The marker in the front yard was easy to find - it was simply buried under a thick pile of pine needles. But with the marker at the back of the property had been driven between cobblestones in the alley. I've glancingly looked for the marker a number of times recently - but to no avail. It has disappeared from view. My last attempt was thwarted when it was wet from heavy rain the night before and there were large puddles where I needed to be looking. Things have now dried out sufficiently, so there I was crouched in the middle of the alley, self-conscious about oddity of my actions and hoping no cars needed to drive down the alleys. I had to scrape away dirt for several minutes until I found the marker again. Success at last! But not a task I hope have to do again.