Fence Staining Quotes

Strange how close the darkness is, even when things seem brightest. Even in the glare of a summer noon, when the sidewalk bakes and iron fences are hot to the touch, the shadows are still with us. They congregate in doorways and porches, and under bridges, and beneath the brims of gentlemen’s hats so you cannot see their eyes. There is darkness in our mouths and ears; in our bags and wallets; within the swing of men’s jackets and beneath the flare of women’s skirts. We carry it around with us, the dark, and its influence stains us deep.

Over the fence— Strawberries— grow— Over the fence— I could climb— if I tried, I know— Berries are nice! But— if I stained my Apron— God would certainly scold! Oh, dear, — I guess if He were a Boy— He'd— climb— if He could!

If he was a member of the human race at all, Neumann was its least attractive specimen. His eyebrows, twitching and curling like two poisoned caterpillars, were joined together by an irregular scribble of poorly matched hair. Behind thick glasses that were almost opaque with greasy thumbprints, his grey eyes were shifty and nervous, searching the floor as if he expected that at any moment he would be lying flat on it. Cigarette smoke poured out from between teeth that were so badly stained with tobacco they looked like two wooden fences.

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops. His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it. Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they be for ever. Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained the land of Aman. For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow. For though Eru appointed to you to die not in Eä, and no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos. There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you. And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as with a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after. The Valar have spoken.

What’s going on?’ she said. ‘Talk to me.’ ‘I …’ I looked down. I didn’t want her to see me. But Rooney was looking at me, eyebrows furrowed, so many thoughts churning behind her eyes, and it was that look that made me start spilling everything out. ‘I just care about you so much … but I’ve always got this fear that … one day you’ll leave. Or Pip and Jason will leave, or … I don’t know.’ Fresh tears fell from my cheeks. ‘I’m never going to fall in love, so … my friendships are all I have, so … I just … can’t bear the idea of losing any of my friends. Because I’m never going to have that one special person.’ ‘Can you let me be that person?’ Rooney said quietly. I sniffed loudly. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I mean I want to be your special person.’ ‘B-but … that’s not how the world works, people always put romance over friendships –’ ‘Says who?’ Rooney spluttered, smacking her hand on the ground in front of us. ‘The heteronormative rulebook? Fuck that, Georgia. Fuck that.’ She stood up, flailing her arms and pacing as she spoke. ‘I know you’ve been trying to help me with Pip,’ she began, ‘and I appreciate that, Georgia, I really do. I like her and I think she likes me and we like being around each other and, yep, I’m just gonna say it – I think we really, really want to have sex with each other.’ I just stared at her, my cheeks tear-stained, having no idea where this was going. ‘But you know what I realised on my walk?’ she said. ‘I realise that I love you, Georgia.’ My mouth dropped open. ‘Obviously I’m not romantically in love with you. But I realised that whatever these feelings are for you, I …’ She grinned wildly. ‘I feel like I am in love. Me and you – this is a fucking love story! I feel like I’ve found something most people just don’t get. I feel at home around you in a way I have never felt in my fucking life. And maybe most people would look at us and think that we’re just friends, or whatever, but I know that it’s just … so much MORE than that.’ She gestured dramatically at me with both hands. ‘You changed me. You … you fucking saved me, I swear to God. I know I still do a lot of dumb stuff and I say the wrong things and I still have days where I just feel like shit but … I’ve felt happier over the past few weeks than I have in years.’ I couldn’t speak. I was frozen. Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.’ She grabbed the bunch of flowers and practically threw them at me. ‘And I bought these for you because I honestly didn’t know how else to express any of that to you.’ I was crying. I just started crying again. Rooney wiped the tears off my cheeks.

We had been looking at some land adjoining the zoo and decided to purchase it in order to expand. There was a small house on the new property, nothing too grand, just a modest home built of brick, with three bedrooms and one bathroom. We liked the seclusion of the place most of all. The builder had tucked it in behind a macadamia orchard, but it was still right next door to the zoo. We could be part of the zoo yet apart from it at the same time. Perfect. “Make this house exactly the way you want it,” Steve told me. “This is going to be our home.” He dedicated himself to getting us moved in. I knew this would be our last stop. We wouldn’t be moving again. We laid new carpet and linoleum and installed reverse-cycle air-conditioning and heat. Ah, the luxury of having a climate-controlled house. I installed stained-glass windows in the bathroom with wildlife-themed panes, featuring a jabiru, a crocodile, and a big goanna. We also used wildlife tiles throughout, of dingoes, whales, and kangaroos. We made the house our own. We worked on the exterior grounds as well. Steve transplanted palm trees from his parents’ place on the Queensland coast and erected fences for privacy. He designed a circular driveway. As he laid the concrete, he put his own footprints and handprints in the wet cement. Then he ran into the house to fetch Bindi and me. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s all do it.” We grabbed Sui, too, and put her paw prints in, and then did Bindi, who was just eight months old. It took a couple of tries, but we got her handprints and her footprints as well, and then my own. We stood back and admired the time capsule we had created. That afternoon the rains came. The Sunshine Coast is usually bright and dry, but when it rains, the heavens open. We worried about all the concrete we had worked on getting pitted and ruined. “Get something,” Steve shouted, scrambling to gather up his tools. I ran into the house. I couldn’t find a plastic drop cloth quickly enough, so I grabbed one of my best sheets off the bed. As I watched the linen turn muddy and gray in the rain, I consoled myself. In the future I won’t care that I ruined the sheet, I thought. I’ll just be thankful that I preserved our footprints and handprints. “It’s our cave,” Steve said of our new home. We never entertained. The zoo was our social place. Living so close by, we could have easily gotten overwhelmed, so we made it a practice never to have people over. It wasn’t unfriendliness, it was simple self-preservation. Our brick residence was for our family: Steve and me, Bindi, Sui, and Shasta.

Ronan hadn't thought much about the future. This was a way he and Adam had always been opposites. Adam seemed to only think about the future. He thought about what he wanted to happen days or weeks or years down the road, and then he backfilled actions to make it happen. He was good at depriving himself in the now in order to have something better in the later. Ronan, on the other hand, couldn't seem to get out of the now. He always remembered consequences too late. After a bloody nose. A broken friendship. A huge tattoo. A cat with human hands. But his head didn't seem built to hold the future. He could imagine it for just a few seconds until, like a weak muscle, his thoughts collapsed back into the present. But there was one future he could imagine. It was a little bit of a cheat, because it was buried in a memory, and Ronan was better at thinking of the past than the future. It was an indulgent memory, too, one he'd never have copped to out loud. There wasn't much to it. It was from the summer after Adam had graduated, the summer he'd spent with Ronan at the Barns. Ronan had come in from working on the fences outdoors and tossed his work gloves onto the grass-cluttered rug by the mudroom door. As he did, he'd seen that Adam's mechanic gloves were lined up neatly on top of his shoes. Ronan had already known Adam was inside the house, but nonetheless, the image made him pause. They were just gloves, grease-stained and very old. Thrifty Adam always tried to get as much wear out of things as possible. They were long and narrow like Adam himself, and despite their age and stains, they were otherwise impeccably clean. Ronan's work gloves, in comparison, were cruddy and creased and coarse-looking, tossed with carefree abandon, the fingers lassoed over Adam's. Seeing the two pairs tumbled together, a nameless feeling had suddenly overwhelmed Ronan. It was about Adam's gloves here, but it was also Adam's jacket tossed on the dining room chair, his soda can forgotten on the foyer table, him somewhere tossed with equal comfort in the Barns, his presence commonplace enough that he was not having to perform or engage with Ronan at all times. He was not dating Ronan; he was living in Ronan's life with him. Shoes kicked off by the door, gloves off.

Not unlike the herbicide-spraying campaigns in Asia, Central Europe was also flown over by helicopters spraying chemicals intended to wipe out the deciduous forests, which had gone out of fashion. Beech and oak trees held very little value at that time; low oil prices meant that no one was interested in firewood. The scales were tilted in favour of spruce – sought after by the timber industry and safe from being devoured by the high game populations. Over 5,000 square kilometres of deciduous woodlands was cleared just in my local region of Eifel and Hunsrück, through this merciless method of dropping death from the air. The carrier for the substance, sold under the trade name Tormona, was diesel oil. Elements of this mixture may still lurk in the soil of our forests today; the rusty diesel drums are certainly still lying around in some places. Have things improved now? Not completely, because chemical sprays are still used, even if they’re not directed at the trees themselves. The target of the helicopters and trucks with their atomising nozzles is the insects that feed on the trees and wood. Because the drab spruce and pine monocultures give free rein to bark beetles and butterfly caterpillars, these are then bumped off with contact insecticides. The pesticides, with names like Karate, are so lethal for three months that mere contact spells the end for any unfortunate insects. Parts of a forest that have been sprayed with pesticide are usually marked and fenced off for a while, but wood piles at the side of the track are often not considered dangerous. I would therefore advise against sitting on them when you’re ready for a rest stop and look out for a mossy stump instead, which is guaranteed to be harmless. This is quite apart from the fact that freshly harvested softwood is often very resinous. The stains don’t come out in the normal wash; you need to attack it with a special stain remover. Stacked wood carries another danger: the whole pile is liable to come crashing down. When you know that a single trunk can weigh hundreds of kilograms, you tend to stay away from a precariously stacked pile. It’s not for nothing that the German name for a wood stack is Polter, as in the crashing and banging of a poltergeist. Back to the poison. In areas sprayed by helicopter I wouldn’t pick berries or mushrooms for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, the forest is low in harmful substances compared to industrial agriculture.

Some children (three solemn-faced kids who, with their mother, were staying with us until their mother’s ex-husband quit threatening them) had made too much noise in Kyle’s pool after seven P.M., which was when Mr. Francis went to bed. We should make sure that all children were in their beds and silent so as not to disturb Mr. Francis if we didn’t want the police called. We’d thought it was a joke, had laughed at the way he’d referred to himself as “Mr. Francis” in his own notes. The grapes along the solid eight-foot-tall stone fence between the backyards were growing down over Mr. Francis’s side. We should trim them so he didn’t have to look at them. He saw a dog in the yard (me) and hoped that it was licensed, fixed, and vaccinated. A photo of the dog had been sent to the city to ensure that this was so. And so on. When the police and the city had afforded him no satisfaction, he’d taken action on his own. I’d found poisoned meat thrown inconspicuously into the bushes in Kyle’s backyard. Someone dumped a batch of red dye into the swimming pool that had stained the concrete. Fixing that had cost a mint, and we now had security cameras in the backyard. But we didn’t get them in fast enough to save the grapes. He’d been some kind of high-level CEO forcibly retired when the stress gave him ulcers and other medical problems.

And then we came to a stop in front of a large yellow Victorian house that sat, so stately, between two brick buildings, like a misplaced Lego piece, overgrown with ivy and bluebells and honeysuckle. The Daffodil Inn looked exactly how I'd imagined. The bed-and-breakfast was fresh and bright, the dentils all painted across the edging on the roof, the corbels replaced, the sawn spandrils and turned spandrils all given proper attention. The bay window was set with a stained-glass daffodil, the same one that encrusted the window in the front door. Around the inn, encasing it like a lovely cage, was a wrought-iron fence overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle that bled into the rose garden that surrounded the house.

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doubled over and an old bobble-hat was hanging down between his knees.  Jamie took another look to see if he was okay, and spotted an empty vodka bottle between his heels against the curb.  She sighed and dragged her eyes back to the man and woman sitting by the fence. They looked up at Roper and Jamie and stopped talking.  As they drew closer the pair got up and walked away quickly without another word, keen to avoid any questions that might have been directed at them. Jamie and Roper didn’t bother calling out, and neither were prepared to chase them down.  They were both in their forties, and neither of them were Grace.  Roper paused at the fence and put his foot on it, craning his neck to see under the bridge beyond.  Long green tendrils looped their way down the bank, the jagged bramble leaves twisting gently in the autumn air.  The sky overhead had turned turbulent and grey, bruised raw by the incoming winter.  Jamie shivered and stepped past Roper, who didn’t seem inclined to make his way onto the loose bank in his old slick-bottom Chelsea boots. Jamie didn’t have that trepidation. She looked back as she stepped over the stained blanket, her deeply-teased heel crunching in the loose stone.  Roper was grimacing, staring down at the bridge and the tents under it.  Jamie could see by the look on his face that he was hoping she’d not ask him to follow. Sounds of conversation were echoing up and a thin blanket of smoke was clinging to the girders above. Someone was warming themselves. Some faces had already appeared in the openings to the little makeshift huts and shelters, peering out at the two newcomers — at the two outsiders.

She had brown hair, cut in swirls around her face, soft blue eyes, and a bounce in her step. I wondered why she was even here, when she could just be out in society with age on her side. Linda told me her boyfriend was drafted and would be leaving for Vietnam. He didn’t want to get married, so she was giving the baby up for adoption. She seemed sad about that, like she would have married him. I knew she came from the good side of town because she had crisp, clean, fashionable clothes. On sunny days, we liked to hang out in the back yard. Over by the large oak tree were several Adirondack slatted chairs. It was serene out there; nobody from the street could see us because of the height of the brick wall. The yard was dotted with a few stately oak trees and the grass was lumpy, but green. Lilac bushes lined the building and were in full bloom when I arrived. The scent of the lilacs brought a fresh longing for the days when we lived in the city. Mom loved lilacs. When I was little, she would cut a fresh bouquet from the bushes in our back yard and arrange them in a tall drinking glass on the kitchen table. They filled the house with their luscious scent. I’d put my nose right into the blooms and give a good sniff. I marveled at the fluted horn blossoms that dotted each branch. I could never inhale enough of their sweetness. Before we moved out to Glenview and lived in our Chicago bungalow on Fairfield Avenue, we had lilacs and grapes along the fence and lilies of the valley along the back-yard sidewalk that led to the alley. Oh, how I missed that yard in the city! You could pick the grapes right off the vine and pop them into your mouth whenever you had a hankering for some fresh fruit. I thought it was glorious to have a fresh supply offered right from nature. I remembered how they popped and squished making purple stains on the sidewalk when you stepped on them. We also had lavender irises that got full of ants when they were budding. I guessed they were just too sweet. The days at the home stretched like the horizon