In early winter, two girls at the same school died within 5 days of each other. I was on the phone at home talking with a teacher from that school, pacing the perimeter of my house. Glancing out the window, I saw that the heavy solid fence between my yard and my neighbors was lying nearly horizontal against their house.
I went out in the darkening evening to talk to my neighbors. There was no answer to my knock. I wrote a note to stick on their door: “I see the fence between our houses has fallen over onto your house. I hope there is no damage. I don’t know if we share the fence, if it is yours or mine or what. Let’s talk.”
Later on my neighbor called. He said it had happened a few days before, while I had been out of town. It had taken the pause on the phone while getting news of the loss of a second young life for me to notice what had happened outside the walls of my house. Otherwise I would have been in my usual routine that didn’t include looking out that window on a school night.
He had already arranged for it to be repaired and reinforced so it would be sufficiently sturdy and not fall over in the future.
Fences fall and can be fixed. We worry how to reinforce our children’s sturdiness so they do not fall. Once they fall, we wish we had been able to catch them before it was too late.